’ . OVERDUE FINES: L1. 25¢ per day per item J {#5}, ‘ RETURNING LIBRARY MATERIALS: "1 3- - ,0, PIace in book return to remove “W 4 charge from circulation records ‘4‘ DISCOURSE AND THE NOVEL FORM: AUTHORIAL INTERLOCUTION IN THE LATER WORKS OF CLAUDE SIMON BY Mark William Andrews A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Romance and Classical Languages 1982 ABSTRACT DISCOURSE AND THE NOVEL FORM: AUTHORIAL INTERLOCUTION IN THE LATER WORKS OF CLAUDE SIMON BY Mark William Andrews Discourse and the Novel Form elaborates a compre- hensive strategy for detecting and describing the utterance of the author within the textual fabric of Claude Simon's novels. Operations and methodology are derived from areas pertinent to literary criticism: linguistic and literary pragmatics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, phenomeno— logy and narratology. Of significant importance is the im- pact of traditional critical exegesis, undertaken in the light of modern forms of analysis. The major finding is that a form of intratextual authorship, defined as interlo- cution, can be identified in the novel, and is crucial to the reading of fictionality in Simon's narratives. Inter- locution occurs as a specifically literary communication in paradoxical counterpoint to the fictional component of the narration. It provides a context in which narrative may be recognised as mask. The opening chapter examines the new novel's polemical claim to the status of theoretical discourse, Mark William Andrews with especial attention given to Simon's refutation of realism and his reworking of the laws of verisimilitude. A second chapter argues that a combination of fictionality and literariness is peculiar to novelistic discourse. The category of authorial interlocution is proposed to describe the utterance which subtends the narrative voice. The succeeding chapters treat four texts, in turn, 23 Bataille de Pharsale, Les Corps conducteurs, Triptyque and Lecon de choses, and portray the drama of inter- locutionsin its successive manifestation. They trace the itinerary of the narration as it quests for a mono- loqix:fictional environment proof against the iconoclastic intrusion of authorial utterance. The location of a level of authorial discourse which deciphers the narration is especially helpful to an underst- andingof Simon's later works, which defy the practice of conventional modes of reading. His novels purport to dramatise writing, narrated as an event. The story of writing is shown to be co-extensive with the proqressive unfolding of an intertextual authorial condition, in which each novel illustrates a developmental phase. The anthropomorphic concerns of the author pervade the loqocentric design of the narrative and constitute a Symbiotic intelligence at work within the novel, decoding the artifice of language into the shape of human ex- perience. For Harry and Joy ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my deep gratitude to Professor M. E. Kronegger, director of the dissertation, for all her enthusiasm, good counsel and prompt attention to matters both academic and administrative. My warm thanks are given to my readers, Professors H. Josephs and L. M. Porter, who have throughout given generously of their time and expertise in assisting me with the many questions I have brought to their attention. And to my family, friends and colleagues I extend my sincere appreciation for their words of encour- agement and material assistance in the preparation of the dissertation. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1. THE STATUS OF THE NOVEL 225 THEORY CHAPTER 2. ANALYSIS OF THE AUTHORIAL INTERLOCUTOR CHAPTER 3. A PURGATORIAL PARADOX CHAPTER 4. THE DESIGN OF ENTROPY CHAPTER 5. CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS CHAPTER 6. SHORT-CIRCUITRY CONCLUSION BIBLIOGRAPHY iv 20 55 102 146 182 208 236 242 INTRODUCTION Claude Simon's public attitude to his work as a novelist has been characterised by a desire to frustrate the effects of realism in literary discourse. The con- cern is a persistent one, recurring in more or less nuanced form and with increasing frequency in recent interviews, talks and discussions. His opposition to the conventions of mimetic description was unequivocally expressed at the Cerisy colloquy of 1974, at which he admitted conceiving of Triptyque as a novel capable of resisting the platitudes of traditional interpretation: "J'avais 1e projet de faire un roman irréductible a tout schéma réaliste."l Triptyque would neither practice nor countenance a schematic reduc- tion of novelistic representation to fit readerly expecta- tions of a unified life—like world. The novel was design- ed to manifest particular independence from interpretation based upon psychological realism, from acts of complacently trite and misleading reference like that performed by a nameless critic on Simon's preceding novel, Les Corps con- ducteurs: "Un homme malade marche dans une rue et se souvient..."2 The reading, while not indefensible, is at best Speculative. It relies upon notions of the novel form unsupported and to some extent abandoned by the text: that 1 2 narratorial consciousness proceeds from an identifiably human source, and more precisely, a protagonist in the work. The stand adopted by Simon stems from a perception that literary communication does not, as is commonly held, necessarily emanate from nor profess a direct re- lation to the human subject and his world. The novel is first and foremost a linguistic event, and it is through an attention to writing that the world of representation can best relieve itself of its customary bond with external reality. When seeking liberation from the strictures of time, place and character, from unity of theme, situation and psychological determinism, Simon anchors his polemical stance in the advocacy of an intentional theory of lan- guage. Meaning is not merely conveyed by a system of lin- guistic signs, it first originates and resides within the medium of the semiotic structure. In the discussion quoted above, Simon continues by elaborating upon an observation of Michel Deguy's, to demonstrate how internal association between words and images is capable of generating character, situation and anecdote: (...) ces correspondances, on Si vous préférez ces échos, ces interferences, ces courts— circuits, ces "convocations" (plus "crédibles" que des rapports découlant de quelque théorie ou systéme psychologique ou sociolOgique, tou- jours discutable) que permettent (et meme suggerent) ce que l'on appelle les "figures" par lesquelles, comme l'a dit Michel Deguy, "la langue parle avant nous" ("figures" qui sont, selon Littré, les métaphores, les tropes,les associations, les oppositions, etc: 1e lapin 3 écorché et la femme nue sur le lit sont tous deux décrits, a quelques pages d'intervalle, en termes exactement semblables et en jouant sur le fait que l'on dit d'une personne nerveuse ou angoissée qu'elle a une sensibilité d'écorché).3 Simon reminds his audience that force is lent to such devices by the irreconcilable intertwining of the three major story lines of Triptyque, where each episode is con- tained within the others, but only as a text of some de- scription, a film, a painting, a postcard, a poster. The real world, placed at a remove from the events of the novel, is usurped in its generative function. The workings of the written word supplant the motivational dynamics of the plot. To hold a position so completely at odds with tra- dition incurs of necessity a more sceptical critical atten- tion than might be the lot of a usual or conformist theo- retical perspective. The new novel has been associated with acts of critical terrorism from its inception; a situation acknowledged by its practitioners in articles such as "Terrorisme, théorie". It might reasonably be argued that while Simon's narrative technique has under— gone radical transformation his novelistic concerns have remained comfortably autobioqraphical. Doubt may be cast on the seriousness of the new novelists' critical posi- tions, based on a futuristic comment by Robbe-Grillet in an interview published in Sub-Stance in 1976: Now they are talking about a new criticism which will be fictitious, which will have elements of fiction just as literature has ele— 4 ments of criticism. But for the moment, the se- paration exists since the critic, like the pro- fessor, must produce a discourse on literature.4 The intrusion of fiction into theory is, as Robbe- Grillet remarks, hindered by the relationship between criticism and literature. In the case of Claude Simon, who abandoned unmediated autobiOgraphy after his first novel, La Corde raide, his literary technique has served to purify and filter out realism from the autobiographical account. The manner in which Simon presents his thematic material becomes progressively more obscure, as the mask of language assumes responsibility for the prose. The final frustrating incompleteness of the mask itself in Simon's novels is suggestive of a fiction, where disbelief is suspended, not banished. The principle of linguistic generativity which appears in critical theory of the new novel derives its justification from the praxis of the no- vel. In this way the close and privileged relationship of criticism to the new novel permits elements of the novel- istic fiction to pass unnoticed into the critical account. The present intrOduction will proceed to enlarge upon the above hypothesis in order to sketch out a theoretical position which will serve to give direction to the forth- coming study of the relationship between fiction and narra- tive in the works of Simon. The statement by Michel Deguy that language is ante- rior to human utterance serves in the context of Simon's elaboration to insulate the novel against a traditional 5 misreading. The textual fabric represents the world in a particular speculum, one shielding the reader from the fixational petrifaction of gorgon realism. Removal of the need for certain time-honored novelistic ingredients, as Frank Kermode remarks of Robbe-Grillet and the new novel in general, provides the reader with a new challenge, by depriving him of his customary habits: (...) it is the old ones who talk about the need for plot, character, and so forth, who have the theories. And without them one can achieve a new realism, and a narrative in which "le temps se trouve coupé de la temporalité. Il ne coule plus." And so we have a novel in which the reader will find none of the gratifi- cation to be had from sham temporality, sham causality, falsely certain description, clear story. The new novel "repeats itself, bisects itself, modifies itself, contradicts itself, without even accumulating enough bulk to con- stitute a past - and thus a "story", in the tra- ditional sense of the word." The reader is not offered easy satisfactions, but a challenge to creative cooperation.5 To circumscribe the role of the new reader entails at least some reCOgnition of the distinction to be maintained between innovation and convention. Incorporated into the literary text at a given level, such a distinction may at once serve and disserve the very opposition it sets up, as Kermode remarks of Dans le Labyrinthe: It is a question how far these books could make their effect if we were genuinely, as Robbe— Grillet thinks we should be, indifferent to all conventional expectations. In some sense they must be there to be defeated.6 What a first would seem to mitigate the splendid isolation of the new novel, in fact contributes to its 6 effective dramatisation of the defeat of realism. It is not surprising that Simon's work also contains realistic elements "there to be defeated", and that, for this reason, he experiences such difficulty in obviating a realist reading of his novels. The defeat is also an affirmation of realism as an opponent necessary to struggle. The case of Robbe—Grillet's Dans le Labyrinthe pre- sents features analogous with Simon's Les Corps conduct— gurg, which can be read as the journal of a sick, at times, delirious, man. The persistence of realism is more complex and subterranean in other, less forced dimensions of Simon's work. The distinction between new and traditional forms does not obligatorily take the shape of a polarised opposition. The world explored in Simon's novels may be regarded as uncharted territory, that which is missing from the map of familiar novelistic features. In this regard the tOpology of the new novel assumes a recognisable form, that of utopia, and may be explored as such; an imaginary or fictional perception and construct that ultimately ex- poses itself, if not in the explicitly sardonic fashion of the self-evident utOpia, such as Zamiatin's We or Huxley's Brave New World, then at least in an implicit dis- qualification of itself as a viable form, a nowhere as opposed to an Erewhog. Born of organising properties manifested by the word in relation to its symbolic environment, the reflective surface of discourse provides a shield for the reader, 7 segregating him from the real world by interposing the image of language in progress. Reality is reputedly neutralised by this tactic, in which the text turns in upon itself in auto—reflexive fashion to preserve itself intact and autonomous. The self-sufficiency of such self-reflective appraisal shares with utopist thought a penchant for the narcissistic and the complacently totalitarian, yet Simon's novels have attracted critical attention largely through their very dramatisation of the linguistic condition of man. Readers of Simon have been fascinated by his depiction of onomastic play and have tended to tag his work with inverted proposi- tions of the kind, "l'écriture d'une aventure devient aventure d'une écriture."7 The act of writing does, of course, frequently intrude upon narration of a story in literature, but in Simon's texts the roles are taken to be completely reversed. For, if the representation of man is preceded and subtended by the linguistic account, then any description of his behaviour can be no more than a super- ficially directed analysis of language. The temptation to anthropomorphise, to locate an un- well interlocutor in Les Corps conducteurs, generally takes place in a vacuum; the critical operation involved takes no heed of the prevailing climate of theoretical Opinion on the text at hand. The purpose of the present study is to examine the later works of Claude Simon, those which most irretrievably 8 deflect the convention of novelistic realism, from a perspective which neither endorses nor resists Simon's conception of the novel, but which seeks to locate and describe in context the utopia of language. The context will be that of the human subject, expressed through the structure of desire which motivates narrative. Peter Brooks, in his article "Freud's Masterplot" highlights the necessary relation of metonymy to narrative, in addition to the role of metaphor. For the new novel metaphor operates as narrative, rather than the reverse, which constitutes Brooks' more traditional perSpective. It may be deduced from Brooks' argument that the totalizing effect of metaphor narrativising itself is not independent from metonymy qua desire. Narrative operates as metaphor in its affirmation of resemblance, in that it brings into relation different actions, combines them through per- ceived similarities (Todorov's common predicate term) appropriates them to a common plot, which implies the rejection of merely contingent (or unassimilable) incident or action. The plotting of meaning cannot do without metaphor, for mean- ing in plot is the structure of action in closed and legible wholes. Metaphor is in this sense totalizing. Yet it is equally apparent that the key figure of narrative must in some sense he not metaphor but metonymy: the figure of contiguity and combination, the figure of syntagmatic rela- tions. The description of narrative needs metonymy as the figure of movement, of linkage in the signifying chain, of the slippage of the signified under the signifier. That Jacques Lacan has equated metonymy and desire is of the utmost pertinence since desire must be considered the very motor of narrative, its dynamic prin- ciple.8 The logomorphic condition of Simon's narrators 9 dramatises the satiation and transformation of anthropo- centric desire into a free and Open economy of metaphoric interplay and exchange. But if Simon's novels borrow from the ateleological desire of schizophrenic discourse, they do so within narrowly circumscribed bounds. The canons of realism define the horizons of Simon's art, they represent the forbidden zone of genetic structure, one, in Jean Piaget's description, closed under transformation. Realism delimits a boundary not to be transgressed, under pain of entering a world of stories and plots, beginnings and end- ings. But utopia too, must be entered and left, and it is in the moment of change that a dialectic between real and ideal forms is established, that the human subject merges with the pronoun shifter "I". Schizophrenic desire is re- gionalised as an aspect, an extension of normal desire to an ultimate absolute condition, where motivation and grati- fication coincide, where dialogue becomes monologue and utopia occurs. For those fortunate few who inhabit the realms of an Eldorado, the fall from grace implies the intrusion of deferral into the principle of instantaneous gratification characteristic of bliss. The imposition of limits on the domain of perfection, tOpographical or other, has this function. It serves to fuel the desire for elsewhere, for the other, since these limits may not be exceeded. They symbolise the force of interdiction, which desire must con- front and so itself be thwarted. The very aspect of the 10 unwelcome limit is foreign to the notion of utopia, but intrinsic to its formulation. In the Garden of Eden, Adam is free to partake of the apple and tranSgress the commandment of his God, al- though he would have no access to his freedom, were it not for the presence of the tree of knowledge as a peri- meter of negation. His fall in literary terms operates on one level as a rhetorical convenience introduced to permit focus on his subsequent fate. Conversely the modern novel desires to dissociate itself from the macula of its tainted past in order to return to a state of linguistic immaculation. Distanciation is conveniently achieved by the recreation ofaaboundary enclosing a latterday lin- guistic garden. But similar conditions for temptation apply as for the original garden eastward in Eden; here realism provides a horizon of interdiction; hence the archetypal transgression of Les Corps conducteurs in assum- ing a psychological consistency. Further analoqy with Adam and his God yields a struc- ture of anomaly in Simon's works which profits his novelis- tic goal. By eating fruit from the tree of knowledge Adam risks death. The ambivalence of his projected demise might be likened to the divergent etymological meanings of the Latin transpassare, which becomes to trespass in English, but trépasser in French. Adam does not encounter mortality directly, but as a result of his tOpographically precise passing over. His trespass against the law of his God 11 entails expulsion from the garden. Access to knowledge bars him from life. He cannot return to the site of the tree to life, but for reasons beyond the cherubim and the flaming sword. These manifestations are no more than sym- bolic demarcations of the frontier between experience gain- ed and innocence lost. The logic of Adam's position is thus far impeccably framed. The cautionary tale of Adam and Eve introduces a third interlocutor disruptive of the symmetry attained. God has the function of a horizon, and so partakes freely of both innocence and experience. God makes this synthesis explicit upon Adam's confession; Adam has not now been ex- cluded from the class of the first person plural, but has been included: "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil."9 God is not bound by his own instructions to Adam, but obeys a different logic, that of the dihedral limit, in which trespass, stripped of its moral sense of mortal trans- gression, is tOpographically inherent as bidirectional transit. Inclusion is the operative principle of God's mobility. In passing over, God subtly alters the nature of limits, calling their definition into question. Simon treats the question of circumscription in two distinct manners, imaginatively and polemically, and is not averse to the inconsistency so implied. On the one hand limits are redefined in a novel and provocative manner, 12 on the other they are held to be abolished. Adam's situation is clearly less complex than that of his God, and it is in the implicit comparison between the two that within the biblical account not only must God appear ineffable, but Adam naive, his expulsion expedient; it is one possible solution to the latter's condition, and does not apply to all of the class "us“. Simon is concerned less with the condition of Adam than that of his maker. Simon's ready rejection of realism serves to focus his attention upon rendering effable a new interpretation of limits. Simon's most recent work to date, Lecon de choses contains a section entitled "Courts Circuits" which dramatises the facticity of hermetic systems of knowledge. The short circuitry of the novel explodes the reader's compartmentalised intelligence of the novel's workings by the introduction ex post facto of a separate order of intelligibility to the events narrated. The text becomes a common ground for multiple categories of explication and a model for inclusive epistemolOgical inquiry. The multivalence of discourse prOposed by Legon de choses is founded upon the topOgraphy of transit. The passage between incompatible systems, from there to here, discloses moreover, the hermeneutic potential thus trans- ported. A tOpology of knowledge formalised by Michel Serres in L'Interférence attributes to the graph of 10 l'ici-ailleurs the shape of science itself, and founds l3 epistemology upon the proliferation of connective tissue. Mobile sur un graphe qui est un réseau de transports, l'épistémologue considére ce graphe comme la science méme, et ce transport comme son mouvement. Or, pour le savant meme, la mobilité devient secret de la découverte. Si le prOgrés des sciences est multiplicatif, de complication et d'application (au sens de mise en correspon— dance), l'ars inveniendi perd son mystére - et le genie son aura de sacralisation - pour devenir ars interveniendi: multiplication des interférences, et instauration de courts— circuits. Inventer, ce n'est point produire, c'est traduire.ll Simon's preoccupation with short circuitry furnishes an exciting project for the rereading of his novels, in which one circuit, that of linguistic autonomy, remains mysteriously intact throughout. The very integrity of the system invites reappraisal of its overweening preten- sions. In light of the insight that interdiction encourages serpentine tranSgression, it is not surprising to note that Simon has in certain of his polemical pronouncements sought to generalise his quarrel with realism into a thoroughgoing rejection of the psyche in favour of a monistic theory of language; a defensive attitude reflect» ed in his narrators' concerns. The effect of such a strategy is especially impressive in a fictional landscape, and it is here that Simon achieves its most uncompromising articulation. In a resolutely materialistic environment, the limits imposed by a duality of matter with mind are rendered obsolete; transparent from within, they become l4 expendable. In the latterday paradise of the text, where the narrative voice is protagonist, Adam's attention has been displaced away from God: the narrator remains ignorant of the authorial interlocutor's caveat emptor. Where no other forms of knowledge are available, Edenic fiction accedes to truth and the attendant impression of a deus absconditus and missing paraphernalia, tree and serpent, subsides. With the passing of knowledge disappears its first manifestation, self-knowledge. The narrator, triumphantly naked, dispenses with the veil of verisimilitude and parades, immortal, as a linguistic shifter englobed in a transformational—generative grammar of narrative. The human condition, otiose, translates into the prOperly in- effable. The fashionable popularity which has greeted Simon's transparently and sometimes playfully manipulative ploy demands corrective vision, if his novels are to be appre- ciated in their full behavioural complexity and not succumb to the charge of being period pieces. In the Eden of Simon's novels the sole intimation of mortality lies with the indwelling creator, who alone is effabilis. Thanks to recent research into narratology, it has become feasible to label an internal authorial figure, half man, half work, a voice emanating from the shadowy recesses of the textual corpse. The character of this recorded communication is habitually described in 15 partisan manner. The Ricardolian school employs the term scriptor, thereby privileging the recording apparatus' mechanical aspect. Wayne Booth prefers the term implied author, thereby neglecting the functioning of the machine. John Hillis Miller has most sensitively described the phenomenon as an indwelling immanence, but this means little in terms of a practical application of the concept. Without entering into the full implications of an as yet tentative narratolOgical formulation, a crude ana- logy with man's use of machinery is apposite. The tool, in any Heideggerian analysis, is characterised by the use to which it is put. The user may in turn be described in terms of a purposive behaviour. The novel is a complex tool, incorporating principles of self-portrayal and illusion; it may be considered deliberately redundant and inappropriate to its stated task. The user is hereby en- abled to depict and perform tasks other than that osten— sibly executed. In this further activity the user de- scribes himself accurately. His description is conditioned by the relation of the general design of the tool to the specific task at hand. The novel, imprinted with a parti- cular occasion of usage, contains a formal and thematic re- cord of intentional behaviour beyond that overtly stated. The above analogy is largely satisfactory as a prop- osition to form a point of departure for theoretical debate on the nature of fictionality and literariness. Subsequent discussion will focus upon Simon's novels with a view to l6 isolating and individualising the voice of an authorial interlocutor. The task of inventing (inventer) an interlocutor displaced to the realm of the forbidden, that which lies beyond the fiction of linguistic autonomy, may be carried out by a calling forth, a translation (traduire) of the interlocutor, not to the Edenic domain of the hidden, but to the diaIOgic mode of bidding, as a voice which forms a horizon of otherness. The interlocutor cannot be produced, (produire) or denoted as part of the fiction, for he is to that fiction as God to Adam. In setting a limit to Adam's activity God must ironically reveal knowledge of otherness, for it is the nature of the limit to show what lies beyond the bounds of the looking glass. For this reason the tree of knowledge is identified from the first as present in the garden, yet the tree of life is identified only when Adam exits the garden. The interlocutor, godlike, does not share in his narrator's bliss, but forms a dialogic en- vironing against which the narrator stands forth, his fic- tion contextualised and thereby unveiled. A calling forth of the interlocutor presents special problems in Simon's novels, which are characterised by a discoherent thematic material in which anecdotal content is related in episodic form. A set of diffenauzstorylines are interwoven and presented serially to form a prOgression of seemingly unrelated vignettes. Cohesion appears to derive from linguistic interplay rather than purposive 17 development; indeed the individual event is frequently irreducible to a single narrative frame, but is appro— priated in turn by different storylines. In the midst of the confusion, the text is liberally besprinkled with a perfusion of overdetermined signifying material, which directs in arbitrary Rousselian onomasia the itinerary of the narration. The lack of differentiation in the presentation of thematic material draws attention to the specificity of the text as a minimalist design. Simon has claimed to have written certain texts in accordance with colour coded models. The concision to which the novel is constrained by the self-limiting key of a thematic Spectrum has tended to displace interest away from the progression of events within a given storyline toward the myriad varieties of linguistic intersection assuming responsibility for the story. Concern for the temporal and causal lOgic of narra- tive sequence has all but been eclipsed. The colour coordination undertaken by Simon is in- sensitive to many aspects of the literary text. Closure is viewed as aesthetic, polydirectional completion of a pictural mosaic of themes, irrespective of the different treatments a single theme may receive in the course of its trajectory. Affective coloration is eschewed in favour of protective colouring. The interplay of images of birth and death forms a significant component of Simon's novelistic technique, but remains subdued, at variance with the 18 novel's professed pictorial concerns. An appreciation of the logic of connotation may help to contextualise and make intelligible postlapsarian man's refusal to confront death. The voice of the authorial interlocutor is audible en sourdine as a manner of depict- ing the narrator's adherence to the tired but time-honour- ed topos of exegi monumentum. A compulsive identification with material displacement in language and an insistence upon mechanical linguistic cloning of robotic human be- haviour reveal themselves to be symptoms of overwhelming death anxiety. Investigation of those histrionic areas of discourse which dramatise the narrator's condition will serve to characterise the voice of an authorial inter— locutor preferring aphasia at the Edenic level of fiction. NOTES 1 Claude Simon: Analyse, Théorie, Proc. of the Colloque HETCerisy, 1-8 Jul. 1974 (Paris: U.G.E., 10/18 1975), p. 124. 2 Claude Simon: Analyse, Théorie, p. 424. a J Claude Simon: Analyse, Théorie, p. 425. 4 Interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet by Katherine Passias, "New Novel, New New Novel" Sub-Stance, no. 13 (1976) I p. 135. 5 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1966; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), p. 19. 6 Kermode, p. 20. 7 Francoise van Rossum-Guyon, "Le Nouveau Roman comme critique du roman," in Problémes généraux, Vol. I of Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd‘hui, Proc. of a Colloque de Cerisy,*20-30 Jul. 1971E1Paris: U.G.E., 10/187—I97YTT p.229. 8 Peter Brooks, "Freud's Masterplot," Yale French Studies, 55/6 (1977), 280-1. 9 The Holy Bible (Authorised Version), Genesis III, 22. 10 Michel Serres, L'Interférence (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), p. 16. 11 Serres, p. 65. 19 CHAPTER I THE STATUS OF THE NOVEL QUA THEORY The claims made for the novel both by the new novelists and their critical adherents have not gained the widespread attention that the resourcefulness and ingenuity of their arguments deserve. For reasons of fashion and taste perhaps rather than of judgement the Sizeable body of literature dedicated to the new novel has been more discarded than refuted. The interaction of the novel with theory was a postulation as revolutionary as it was ephemeral. Dismissed after only cursory scrutiny as a form of radical chic, which it undoubtedly was in part, the notion of a theoretical novel combined extreme positions with incisive commentary and insight into the novel form. The complex interaction of novelistic theory and practice is not to be lightly set aside in the present endeavour to return to a more tradi- tional reading of Simon's works. The novel's status 323 theory demands painstaking examination if it is to be Shifted from a systemic to a thematic condition of the text, for it calls into question many of the unspoken conventions upon which rest the reader's assumptions as to the defini- tion of the novel form. 20 21 Claude Simon explains his attempt to institute an irreducible plurality of meaning in Triptyque in terms of his desire to attest the literal incommunicability of human experience through language. Simon leads his reader to be- lieve that the novel does not impart or yield a message to a receiver. Reading is the diversion afforded by an appre- ciation of abstract linguistic interplay within the Space of the text. The absence of an addressee liberates the writer from his sense of purposeful communication and the linguistic medium from its vehicular function of address. Unquestioning acceptance of Simon's point of view is made difficult by the absence of any means of the reader's disposal to appreciate art in this form. Simon employs realistic discourse in his theoretical explanations at a moment when he is rejecting tout schema réaliste as a less. than credible novelistic illusion. If the novel is to be considered only as a statement by language about itself, then theory becomes indistinguishable from art. Simon's considerations are themselves compromised by the fact of their utterance, for, according to his position, the in- effability of language as a closed intransitive system can- not be reduced to the illusory mode of intellection prac- tised by reader and author in communication. The identification of the novel as a type of theory is the bastion of modern criticism and also its Achilles'heel. The popular refutation of realism as a literary convention 22 seeks its justification in the postulate of an interchange- ability of art and research, yet the intelligibility of textual exegesis depends upon a generic distinction. The implicit assumption that all art is theory but not all theory is art is untenable because Simon's critical per- Spective insists that language is unmediated by the inten- tionality of human utterance. The crisis of realism depicted in the New Novel may more profitably be viewed as a narrative strategy destined to reassert the novel's capacity for fascination with the exploration of the unfamiliar. The self-imposed task of Simon has been the disruption of a firmly entrenched com- placency in reading habits occasioned by the atrOphy of realism as a tradition of the novel. The willing suSpen- sion of disbelief indicated by Coleridge has been eclipsed. by reading practices which take as their rationale a corollary belief in the direct equivalence of art and life. Simon's more extreme articulations are to be understood in the climate of terrorism which characterises contemporary debate on the new novel. His implementation of these claims, when examined from an historical perspective, reveals a novelistic practice which has explored rather than escaped the boundaries of verisimilitude. Unlike his theo- retical statements, Simon's work as a novelist encourages new habits of reading and investigates original avenues for realistic portrayal of the human condition. 23 The Opinion that Spontaneous acts of language precede and are more credible than the mind's power of representa- tion was voiced by Simon at Cerisy. It is a statement des- tructive of the categories by which a novel customarily simulates reality. In its negative aspect the observation is a terrorist act; it generates a nihilistic ideology in which humanistic psychology has no part. The narrator and his characters serve to expose the chimera of sentience pro- duced by language. The authorial interlocutor is to be in- ferred as a concept superseded by the linguistic Sign. He represents no more than the capacity of the signifier to produce apparently meaningful images as it pursues a random itinerary. Simon's most recent novels situate themselves within the fabric of language and attempt to chart the ad- ventures of a subject without purpose or identity. The writer's sole task is represented as that of an automaton who performs the act of inscription. His libidinal pre- sence is neutralised by the arbitrary logic which governs the relationship between language and the natural world. As an autoreflexive form the text maintains an insular logic of word association and transformation. Robbe-Grillet,pursuing a similar argument during the Cerisy colloquy on his own work in 1975, modified this posi- tion by the admission of a level of affectivity in his writing. The text represents an effort to neutralise authorial intentionality by exposing it as the gratuitous 24 result of the autarchic signifying activity of language. In an ambivalent statement not unworthy of that which con- veys Valmont's attitude to love, "i1 faut avant tout, 1e "1 combattre et l'approfondir, Robbe-Grillet expresses a concern to attack and subdue his libidinal, affective pre- occupations precisely by selecting them as the novel's apparent themes, which language will expose as the random phantasms of unrelated series Of Signs: Au contraire, le matériau auquel i1 faut S'attaquer 1e plus est celui qui sera le moins neutre. Bien entendu, je renonce quand méme a l'idée de mon individualité intérieure et je reconnais, dans mes fantasmes, ceux de toute une société. Néanmoins, dans la grande banque des fantasmes de la société, j'ai choisi avec une obstination assez remarquable un certain nombre de themes, qui ne sont pas du tout statistique- ment communs a tout le monde, mais au contraire ceux qui constituent, dans une certaine mesure ce qu'on pourrait appeler moi. Et c'est a cela que le processus de neutralisation a été applique.2 One may suspect that Robbe-Grillet's decision to pre- serve his affectivity by attacking it, "present a l'intér- ieur meme de la Serialité qui le travaille,"3 rather than suppressing it,"4 évacuer l'affect pour commencer," is not simply a tactical manoeuvre, but is fundamental to his de- sire to write novels and persists for this reason in his writing. As Franqois Jost astutely remarks, the neutralisa- tion of the libido implies at some level the articulation of the affective dimension which is being nullified: "i1 s'agit toujours d'une affectivité neutralisée, mais quand méme d'une affectivité."5 25 The position adopted by Simon and Robbe-Grillct allows for no distinction between discourse in general and the novel form in particular. However, the novel appears to Jost to provide an experience of individual libidinal preoccupations foreign to scientific expression. The neu- trality of language is invaded by a principle of self— portrayal by virtue of the very existence of a neutralising process. The language of Simon's novels cannot be neutral if it requires neutralisation, for the act of castration is dramatic in character; it points out what is missing. All of literature is a mask, according to Roland Barthes' formulation: "Toute 1a littérature peut dire: Larvatus prodeo, je m'avance en designant mon masque du 6 The generalisation that the mask provides a uni- doigt." versal discursive form may be qualified by the Observation, that the mask performs a variety of functions. The mask in- dicated by a historical document is a form of linguistic transparency which permits apprehension of a world of Ob- jects or facts. The novel form is composed of a narrative characterised by opacity. At some point novelistic dis- course is expected to manifest its own fictional content in the shape of a falsification, an independence from the real external world. The distinction between the theory of criticism and the art of the novel reflects a dichotomy of purpose in the principle of mask. The plausible lucidity of Simon's 26 commentary On his work contrasts with the impenetrable con- fusion which envelOps his novelistic world. Literature may focus attention upon itself as mask in opposite ways. A reconciliation of the polarity is imperative for the vindi- cation of the new novel as theory. Revelation of the con- ditions of production of linguistic discourse must be seen to remain a consistent procedure, undifferentiated by the circumstances of individual communication. The interrelationship between the theoretical articu- lation of literary criticism and the practice of novelistic composition has understandably become a subject of concern for critics and practitioners of the new novel alike. A concerted attempt has been made to undermine generic dis- tinctions in literature in order to obviate the objection that a novel cannot provide a sustained theory Of language. and that criticism cannot participate in the novel's special power of illusion. A synOpsiS of this endeavour is helpful in the task of locating the problems which confront a reader concerned to understand Simon's later works as novels. Literary criticism has become a self-conscious activity which aSpires to make textual exegesis contingent upon ana- lysis of the critical method selected to perform a given reading. In the introduction to her recent study on Andre Gide, Martine Haisani-Léonard quotes from Henri Meschonnic, Pour lapoétique, to illustrate that the close reading of a literary work entails a constant attention to the text, 27 and also requires a sensitivity to the nature of the res- ponse elicited from the reader or solicited by him from the work: "On ne peut Séparer l'étude d'un objet de l'étude de la méthodologie a la découverte de cet objet."7 Maisani- Iébnardidentifies two fields of inquiry Open to the literary critic; that which is provided by the specialists in the works of a particular author and that supplied by a growing body of literature on the nature of critical discourse: Il est devenu "dangereux" de s'aventurer dans une étude critique, dans la mesure ofi elle devra S'adresser non seulement aux Specialistes d'un auteur donné, mais aussi a deS critiques a la recherche d'une méthode d'analyse. The dangers attendant upon a venture into literary criticism stem from the burgeoning corpus of research into readerly reSponse. The apparent peril of a desertion of the literary text in favour of a solipsistic science of reading has been anticipated by critics of the new novel. Prevalent amongst leading exponents is the vision of a Janus-faced text in which the actualisation of novelistic practice and the pure hypothesis of critical theory are indissolubly linked as the coextensive surfaces of a dihedron or inter- face. The article "Terrorisme, Théorie" contributed by Jean Ricardou to the Cerisy colloquy on the French new novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet takes as its first prefatory epigraph a model for the interaction of theory and practice proposed by Novalis in his Grand repertoire: "La semi-théorie 28 éloigne de la pratique; la theorie complete y raméne."9 The corollary to this statement, that practice may achieve the status of theory, has also become popular. The French new novel has engaged in a response to new critical direc- tions, and has sought to manifest iconoclastic techniques in its confrontation with theoretical debate. Renato Barilli refers to a dialectical process in the collision of creative and analytical forces, which he christens with the term culturological: Mais il serait plus juste de le (mon type de lecture) définir culturologique, parce que dans ce cas 1e point de vue sous lequel on se place est celui d'une unité plus large et indivise, celle de la culture, a la formation de laquelle concourent conjointement tous les types d'acti- vité, pratique et théorique, sans que l'on accorde un privilege substantiel a l'un d'entre}O The new novelists have incorporated the ongoing dialogue between theory and practice into their work by isolating the novel proper from its novelistic components. Sollers claims that the novel must divest itself of identifiable features: "Le roman doit brfiler et consumer toutes traces "11 Gerald du roman on se résigner 5 n'étre qu'un roman. Prince has distinguished Sollers, work from that of other new novelists by reversing the categories of form and prac- tice for the latter group. Whereas the new novel, that of 12 the new new Sollers, Offers "1e roman sans romanesque," novel would provide "le romanesque sans roman."l3 The novelistic elements combine to form the plot, a disconnected tissue Of events which do not emerge as a coherent story 29 line. The subnarratives of Triptyque, three mutually in- compatible stories, resist synthesis in the frame of a ternary structure. Each fragment attests the logical im- possibility of the other two and is itself irretrievably disseminated throughout the three panels of the triptych. The new novel dramatises the randomly distributive nature of language in order to constitute itself as theory. AS a fiction about discourse the novel promotes itself to the status of a commentary upon the linguistic signifier as an agent subversive of narrative cohesion. The novel appears in the guise of a discourse about fiction. The tidiness of the exchange is essential to the act of trans- vestism. A hallucinatory clarity englobes and obscures the misrepresentation of the novel as theory to the point where novelist and critic alike anthropomorphise language: En s'affirmant comme aventure d'une écriture au lieu de l'écriture d'une aventure (...) le Nouveau Roman (...) se constitue en théorie du roman puisqu'il met a nu sa condition de possibilité selon laquelle c'est la narration qui institue la fiction et non l'inverse. The claims made respectively for Simon and Robbe-Gillet are extreme, even terrorist, in part because of the radical nature of their enterprise. Both are trying to redress the balance of tradition by obliging the reader to remain in a state of suspended disbelief towards a story at a time when verisimilitude has frequently become, as Jean Ricardou sug- gests, a belief, sometimes preposterous, in the interpene- tration of art and life: "Je pourrais mentionner de mon 30 c6té l'avis d'un lecteur m'assurant: L'observatoire de Cannes, mais c'est exactement mes vacances a Cannes!"15 This putative reader, unaware that his own holidays in Cannes may be no more to him than a representation afforded by memory, is resolutely determined to confuse the illusion of reference afforded by the novel with the object of re- ference, the reality of Cannes itself. This phenomenon is, according to Ricardou, so pervasive as to be all but uni- versal: ...mais je songe 3 tous les gens qui pensent a propos de tel roman: moi, a la place de tel personnage, j'aurais fait autre chose. Qui ne l'a pensé, a part vous? Eh bien ces gens font en quelque sorte passer un personnage du domaine du signifié 5 celui du référent. Ils substituent a un étre Signifié un étre quotidien en chair 16 et en 03 qui pourrait leur servir de référent. The Saussurean distinction made by Ricardou between the signified and the referent is unsatisfactory in that it makes no allowance for the status of the latter within the reader's consciousness. Admission of the object of refer- ence to the realm of intelligibility constitutes an anomaly within the binary system of the sign as signifier/signified. The uncertainty which Ricardou manifests in his remarks on the transition between signified and referent are due to the inability of semiotics to explain the relationship, which exists, "en quelque sorte" between the referent and the Sig- nified. The domain to which the explanation prOperly belongs is that Of phenomenology, which deals with the relationship of concepts to things. While the dubious compatibility of 31 semiotics and phenomenology remains in contention, the latter certainly supplies a plausible model for the illus- tration of Ricardou's precept. Consciousness, according to Husserl in the Meditations cartésiennes, is dependent upon the constitution of the Object as cogitatum or intentional Object in the perceiving consciousness. The Object of reference is never actually present, but is transformed by the veil of the mind into recognisable or idealised Shape: "Le mot intentionnalité ne Signifie rien d'autre que cette particularité fonciere et générale qu'a la conscience d'étre conscience 92 quelque chose, de porter, en sa qualité de cogito, son cogitatum 'Il? en elle-meme. In a semiotic system, perception of the referent may be designated more accurately as the creation of a signified in the subject's consciousness by an inten- tional inference Of the referent as a signifier. The struc- ture of the Sign remains intact at this Spontaneous level, described by Husserl as réflexion naturelle, and serves as a base upon which further Sign systems may be imposed. At a secondary level the subject engages upon the activity of reflection as opposed to perception. This process, one of réflexion transcendentale according to Husserl, reduplicates the act of perception, but infers its signifier not from the referent but from the signified already present within the reflective consciousness: "d'autre part, les réflexions (actes réflexifs) qui nous revelent ces actes spontanés et 32 qui sont elles-mémes des actes perceptifs (erfassend) d'un ordre nouveau."18 The phenomenon described by Ricardou as a substitution of the referent for the signified can be determined as a Short circuit in the mind's eye of the reader. The latter imposes a description of Cannes upon his memory of Cannes. The exchange is more complex than at first appears, both images are transcendental signifieds: the novel purveys for the reader a primary or natural representation upon which a particular reading is predicated, forming a second— ary or transcendental representation; the memory of Cannes is likewise superimposed upon the original impression. Both the reading and the memory, enjoying a Similar status, can fuse to form a Single image. Foucault's discussion of Don Quixote in Les mots et les choses provides an illuminating example of the propensity for referential illusion in lan- guage: "Dans la seconde partie du roman, Don Quichotte rencontre des personnages qui ont lu la premiere partie du texte et qui le reconnaissent, lui, homme réel, pour le heros du livre."19 In this instance the novel mimics the activity of the reader, but reverses the categories of fiction and the natural world. The novel attests the authenticity of its own world by apprOpriating a dimension beyond the horizon of fictional experience. The first volume of Don Quixote, an actual work, is presented as evidence that the second 33 part is identifiable as the realitv which contains the first. Just as the reader recruits fiction to establish and restructure his own sense of identity, so the novel accedes to truth both by assuming and reordering the shape of the external world. But when the domain of the novel is taken to be no more than the simple reduplication of actual experience, the reader is no longer engaged in art; he has embarked upon life and has ceased to read accurately. The failure to respond to the polyvalence or undecidability of the narrative fiction represents an attempt to escape from the novel experience of a new order by the reimposition of familiar reality upon the strangeness of the text. The "schema réaliste" opposed and abandoned by Simon, has as its central tenet the supposition that the novel should encourage the reader to familiarise his experience of the text by reference to the real world as it is usuallv represented. The task of the novel is to impose an order upon the real world, an undertaking considered by Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics as fundamental to works of narrative fiction: "More than any other literary form, more perhaps than any other type of writing, the novel serves as the model by which society conceives of itself, the discourse in and through which it articulates the ”20 The novel offers a world ordered or articulated world. as the fabric of a coherent structure, one which constitutes an illusion of recognition: "(If) the basic convention 34 governing the novel is the expectation that readers will, through their contact with the text, be able to recognise a world which it produces or to which it refers (...)."21 The simulation of order projected by the reading of a text does not have to correspond to the natural world, only to the manner in which the reader is accustomed to organise and familiarise artistic experience. Tzvetan' Todorov pursues the distinction between order and reality by referring to Northrop Frye's treatment of the latter in art as a form of conventional artifice: Et qu'est-ce que le vraisemblable? Son contraire est-i1 seulement la prOpriété d'histoires oh les personnages peuvent faire n'importe quoi (p. 51)? Frye lui-méme en donnera ailleurs une autre interpretation qui met en question ce premier sens du mot (p. 132: Un peintre original sait, bien entendu, que lorsgue le public lui demande une fidélité a la réalité (to an object), il veut, en régle générale, exactementEIe contraire: une fidélité aux ggnventions picturales gui lui sont familiéres). A reading public more concerned with preconceived notions of reality than with original modes of artistic expression provides a stultifving atmosphere for the inno- vative novelist. The iconoclastic pose struck by Simon sig- nifies an attempt to disrupt habitual patterns of aesthetic response, but succeeds in a manner different from that anti- cipated. Instead of abolishing realism, his work illus- trates Frye's thesis that art contains its own formal logic and only breaks with the convention in order to "rediscover convention on a deeper level."23 35 The earlier novels of Simon sought to reinstitute a sense of unfamiliarity in the reader by taking realism to an extreme form, beyond that of the realists. Culler des- cribes the work of Flaubert as the suppression of thematic context in favour of a referential illusion: The fundamental character of a 'realistic' or referential discourse is, as Philippe Hamon says, to deny the story or to make it impossible by producing a thematic emptiness (une thématigue 24 vide) ('Ou'est-ce qu'une description?', p. 485). In ”L'Effet de reel” Barthes suggests that thematic material, the signified, is excluded from the Sign by the establishment of a direct relation between referent and sig- nifier. The process results in an objectivisation of detail as concrete form: ”Sémiotiquement, le" detail concret" est constitue par la collusion directe d'un référent et d'un Signifiant; le Signifie est expulsé du signe."25 Culler demonstrates Flaubert's command of objective description by illustrating the indirection of meaning which can result from referential illusion; he recruits Barthe's insight into the undecidable significance of objects to buttress his own reading of realism as heralding a dislocation of the text from the world: By blocking access to concepts Flaubert shows his mastery of what Barthes calls the indirect lan- guage of literature: 'the best way for a language to be indirect is to refer as constantly as possi- ble to things themselves rather than to their con- cepts, for the meaning of an object always flick- ers, but not that of the concept.‘ (Essais cri- tiques, p. 232). Relying upon this referential 36 function, Flaubert produces descriptions which seem determined only by a desire for objectivity and thus leads the reader to construct a world which he takes as real but whose meaning he finds difficult to grasp. Realism became transmuted in succeeding works such as Sartre's La Nausée into a discomfort with objects which bordered upon hallucination. In the raw novel concrete de- tial served, as Culler indicates, to focus attention upon the subversion of reality by a writing which was unremit- tingly referential, but startlingly unpredictable, a writ- ing which would juxtapose irreconcilable accounts of the real world. At first, however, writing was less concerned to manifest its own independence than to reflect obsessive states of consciousness. Concrete detail appeared as the objective correlative of phenomenolOgical deformation and disorientation in perceived reality. The new novelists attempted to refer to the Object itself rather than to the concept by the technique of chosisme; this practice typified the early works of Simon and eSpecially Robbe-Grillet. Yet the radical departure from the convention of realism was less iconoclastic than had been anticipated, for the fascination with objects in what has come to be known as the phenomenological novel of the early 1960's proved itself susceptible to traditional modes of interpretation. Even Les Corps conducteurs was seen by Simon as a victim of a conventional style of criti- cism. The depiction of a phenomenological consciousness in 37 the act of perceiving the natural world, réflexion natur- elle, was based upon an opposition between man and the world which was little different from that which was displayed in the novels of the preceding century. In their effort to suppress the subject, the new novelists placed greater em- phasis on the object at the moment of its assimilation into human consciousness. The reflective act, réflexion trans- cendentale, was eliminated in favour of a demonstration of the mythomanic propensity for distortion within the reflex- ion naturelle: Le grand mérite du Robbe-Grillet premiére maniére est d'avoir découvert que méme les états mentaux apparemmentles plus irréels vivent dans 1e dehors, renversés sur les Objets. Ainsi 1e narrateur guérit la pensée phénoménologigue d'Husserl des tendances conscientialisantes qui la poussaient a privilégier le momeg; du sujet par rapport au moment de l'objet. The desire evidenced by the new novel to dispense with subjectivity was at this time based on the very premise that they wished to abolish, that of a polarity between man as the cogito and the world as cogitatum. As this contra- diction became apparent, Simon and Robbe-Grillet turned to what has been described by Barilli as a model of absence or différance: Modéle de l'absence, donc, pour les derniers romans et cine-romans de Robbe-Grillet. Ceci veut dire: disparition definitive du sujet, du je, qui dominait au contraire, ffit-ce sous une forme sournoise, dans les romans du cycle phénoménologique.28 38 Whereas Simon's earlier attempts to avoid psychologi- cal realism were partly unsuccessful because he had not fully succeeded in overturning the traditional categories of subject and object, his later works accomplish a more thoroughgoing reversal of realistic techniques. The method is an inversion of Barthes' recommendations for indirection in language. The réflexion transcendentale of the narrator is privileged over the réflexion naturelle. The reader is thus estranged from the world of objects and marooned with- in a thematic context which has no area of contact with reality as he is accustomed to recognise it. The novel pro- vides a superstructure of signs which refer autoreflexively and reciprocally to themselves without providing a consis- tent foundation in natural perception. The model of ab- sence is installed by the promotion of an irretrievable con- fusion between life and art in the story line or narrative signified, and a constant exchange and transformation of lexical items in the syntax or signifying chain of the text. Reality undergoes this process of neutralisation as it en- ters the domain of representation in order "to refer as con- stantly as possible" not to things, but to their absence. The territory of novelistic experience can no longer be directly familiarised by the imposition of a readerly con- vention such as the illusion of reference. The barrier be- tween art as réflexion transcendentale and life as reflex- ion naturelle which exists within the mind of the reader is 39 transgressed with impunity. The reader is left with the impression of the fruitlessness of his task, and that his reading is to be considered as no more than a tOpographical schematisation predicated on the text by the independently distributive function of language. The history of the new novelist's reaction against literary realism reveals a limitedly successful polemic. The rejection of a dichotomy between man and the world is undertaken phenomenologically through the ostracism of man from a capacity to signify, and the somewhat inconsistent corollary of an objectification of sensory stimuli or EET flexion transcendentale in language. Le modéle phénoménologique rend assez bien compte, disons de 70%, du Nouveau Roman premiére maniére, tandis qu'il perd du terrain et tombe méme en désuétude au début des années 60; pour le modéle de l'absence, c'est exactement 1e contraire: il est timidement applique dans les années 50, i1 voit augmenter son degré de congruence de plus en pigs Si on l'applique aux oeuvres récentes. Both phases of the novel explore new facets of the novel's power of illusion and reject the old. The latest of Simon's novels progress towards pure self-representation, and most successfully dispel the convention of realism. In Ricardolian terminology, this effect is achieved by the confrontation of redoublement by dédoublement. The former unifies illusion by instituting a direct mimetic equiva- lence of life and art, the latter disperses illusion by revealing its workings or diegetic content at the expense 40 of its referential capacity: le redoublement suscite l'effet representatif, 1e dédoublement suscite l'autoreprésentatif. Or j'ai démontré ailleurs gue l'autoreprésentg- tif agit comme contestation du représentatif. 0 Since representation is not excluded from either of Jean Ricardou's categories, a meta-structure exists; both function in analogous but mutually inimical fashion. ”La fascination qu'exercent les aventures d'un récit est in- versement prOportionnelle a l'exhibition des procedures génératrices.'31 No final supremacy is possible in terms of the literal obliteration of redoublement because of an equivalence of this form on the metaphorical dimension of the text. Inter- nal reduplication or dédoublement is a dependent form, and must therefore exist also in a paradigmatic relation of direct proportion to representation, a lOgic intuited in Ricardou's following Observation: La mise en abyme tend a restreindre l'éparpille- ment des récits fragmentaires selon un groupement de récits métaphoriques. Tel est son rOle anti- thétique: l'gnité, elle 1a divise; la dispersion, elle l'unit.3 The two forms are both similar and different. They function simultaneously on two levels of the text according to Genette's formulation of the Greek adverb 32, "semblable- ment mais différemment."33 In order to pursue the metaphor- ical representation of reality in Claude Simon's later works, an expansion of the somewhat narrow equivalence of verisimilitude with literary realism becomes desirable. If, 41 as Frye suggests, conventions of art may be stripped from the process of artistic creation only to reveal convention in another dimension of the work, then realism must be understood not only as a form of referential illusion, but as one manifestation among others of the novel's power to create truth through illusion, the principle of verisimili- tude. Verisimilitude has proved a difficult term to encom- pass with a Simple definition. Both in its literal accep- tation as likeness to truth and in common usage as true to life or mimetic, the notion is susceptible to uneasy, eva- sive description. Life, truth and reality are Protean forms which elude the critical graSp and confound the powers of intellection. The inevitable confusion between representa- tion and reality which occurs when literature purports to convey truth is indicated by Jacques Derrida in his article, "Le facteur de la vérité”: "C'est la métaphore d3 la vérité. On peut dire aussi bien la métaphore de la meta- phore, la vérité de la vérité, la vérité de la métaphore."34 Literature, suggests Derrida, does not so much convey as it does purvey truth, and the truth within its purview is per- ceptible as the movement of paradox. Representation and reality are present each in terms of the other. Reality is garbed in the invisible raiment of representation; con- versely, the latter is to be viewed as that which clothes the hidden figure of the former. The image presented in 42 Hans Andersen's fairy tale, The Emperor's New Clothes, is an allegory of the process which unifies form and content: ”Telle unite se trouve, en une structure indémaillable, mise en scene sous la forme d'une nudité g£_d'un vétement invisibles, d'un tissu visible pour les uns, invisible pour les autres, nudité a la fois inapparente et exhibée.”3S Confronted by the insight that art cannot be true to life, but that each is true only when apprehended indirectly through the presence of the other, Derrida conceives of truth as the drama of invisibility. Différance is revealed to be truth in motion, "un mouvement de l'aletheia"36 with- in Andersen's text. The movement, both modest and exhibi- tionist, is one of veiling: ”La determination du texte comme voile dans l'espace de la verite.”37 The introjection of the literary text into the fabric of reality permits the undecidabilitv of paradox. Truth can no longer be granted the privilege of a transcendental mean- ing, it has been invaded by a principle of representation. The movement generated by literature goes beyond decidable truth, now obfuscated within an aesthetic of revelation through concealment: ”Une littérature peut donc produire, mettre en scéne et en avant quelque chose comme la vérité. Elle est donc plus puissante que la vérité dont elle est capable. (...) Cet espace (de la vérité decidable) est débordé par des puissances de simulacre."38 Verisimilitude may be said to allow the veil of 43 literature to be either transparent or opague, according to the function of the literary sign as mimetic or diegetic, true to life or true to art. The veil is, however, never fully penetrable or impenetrable. Similarly in Andersen's fable, no consensus can be reached as to whether the king is naked or clothed. In either case the flickering mystery of literary truth would become unintelligible as the apod- icticity of certitude. Decidable truth is for Derrida a contradiction in terms which defies the linguistic core of human experience. Derrida perceives Lacan as having betrayed himself in sub- jecting truth to a criterion of verifiability. Gayatri Spivak summarises the disagreement in her introduction to the English translation of De la grammatologie: It appears to Derrida that, in spite of giving to the unconscious the structure of a language, Lacan has contrived to entrench Freud's meta- physical suggestions by making the unconscious the seat of verification and truth.39 Reality, from a Derridean perspective, exists within the mind as a deferred presence, reconstituted by the faculty of perception and clothed in the mask of language: ”Whereas Derrida sees 'truth' (if one can risk that word) as being constituted by 'fiction' (if one can risk that word), Lacan seems to use fiction as a clue to truth.”40 Lacan is interpreted by Derrida as imposing a common sense division between reality and fiction. The latter serves as a vehicle for decidable truth because Lacan has preserved 44 a traditional distinction between reality and truth. Derrida's refutation of decidable truth is founded upon a sense of man's linguistic character. Truth is ineffable, for it cannot be communicated without being subjected to semiosis, at which point it becomes undecidable. His formu- lation extends beyond novelistic verisimilitude. Despite Spivak's use of the term fiction, Derrida's account pertains principally to the deformation inherent in all communicative activity. As such it is more exactly an analysis of semio- tic verisimilitude, of which fiction is an incidental com- plication; in Spivak's usage, however, fiction is to be un- derstood as no more than the veil of the text. Verisimilitude exists within language as a principle of intelligibility and cannot be reduced to the category of reality. The latter is absent from Derrida's formulation of truth, it is a void abhorred by nature: "c'est que la nudité n'appartient pas a la nature et gu'elle a sa vérité 41 ”Le facteur de la verité" contains a dans la pudeur." potential equation of the unintelligibilitv of the real world or its oneiric reflection, with decidable truth. A quotation from The Interpretation of Dreams, incorporated into Derrida's article, elaborates the process by which re- presentation subsumes the real world: 11 n'est pas trés hardi de supposer que le con- tenu incomprehensible du réve (der unverstandliche Trauminhalt) a incite a chercher uneEinkIeidung T...Y, un déguisement (un vétement gfii dissimfile et travestit) dans lequel la situation dont 1e souvenir était present devant nous devInt riche 45 de sens (Sinnreich). Celle-ci (la situation) est ainsi-EFIVEFTSeraubt) de sa signification originaire (ursprfingliche Bedeutung), rendue disponible a des fins trang res. Derrida indicated a structural complication which en- folds Freud's account. The Einkleidung of the retelling is preceded by that of recall, the record does not accede to the nudity of its object of reference. Derrida does not pursue this point, but it is evident that the original mean- ing of the dream is not faithfully conveyed by memories of the dream. The unverstandliche Trauminhalt has already been veiled by the act of recollecting the dream prior to its literary renderings. Furthermore the dream itself does not constitute a decidable counterpart to the natural world, it is already a representation of that reality in imaginative form. The Einkleidupg_has a parallel function in the novel; the interpreter or author conceals the world of experience by projecting it into the polyvalent medium of representa- tion, thereby obscuring its original decidability, the immediate mystery of its presence. Derrida's dissertation upon the nature of truth identifies verisimilitude as a model of differance which centres attention upon represen— tation as a simultaneous veiling and unveiling. The staging takes precedence over the reality hidden behind the mask of art, for the object is absent from view, but made recognis- able and intelligible by the revelation of its disguise: "Bouhours, cité par Condillac dans De l'art d'écrire: Les 46 métaphores sont des voiles tranSparents qui laissent voir ce qu'ils couvrent, ou des habits de masque, sous lesquels on reconnait la personne qui est masquée."43 Derrida establishes the importance of the veil as a means of access to truth, yet his principle of undecidabi- lity deals only with truth qua presence. He abstains from identifying truth with absence, or from defining truth in its relation to the self. Fiction, if it is to be discern- able as such, is bound to truth in a relation of visibility to presence. Fiction reveals itself as an imposter in its pretention to decidability; the impenetrability of its veil is a violation of verisimilitude. The merely visible as- pires to become actually present. In the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes, to pursue the Derridean analogy beyond its original confines, the clothes take on visible substance and assume the form of the emperor. But the latter is not the stuff of the veil, he is elsewhere. The location of the emperor is immaterial to the illusion, from which he remains absent. The viewer can penetrate the illusion gag absence only in a dis- appointed expectation of presence. In the case of realism, that provided by the eyes of the little boy, the emperor happens to be present, but the real discovery is that the clothes are visibly absent. The strictures of verisimili- tude permit another equally disappointing solution; one which explodes the equivalence of realism to verisimilitude. 47 The emperor's presence is superfluous, it might be removed. Another viewer could have expostulated, ”There is no emper- or!” But he would have discovered no more than the boy. The fictional clothes are visible yet absent irrespec- tive of what they do or do not contain. Verisimilitude in no way presupposes truth as a function of reality or fan- tasy. It may be deduced simply as a desire to look beyond the visible. Such vision depends upon the hypothesis that the visible is absent. It follows that the domain of the beyond exists tOpographicallv as other for the self-hood of the viewer, since it lies beyond the limit Of illusion's mirror. Derrida's undecidable truth eguates to self-con- sciousness, an awareness of the self as other through the illusory shape of communication. As a stylisation of human behaviour literature repre- sents the exercise of self-consciousness. The reader's response is limited by a factor, extraneous to his own hori- zon of expectation. A dialogue is opened between what the text offers as truth, and what part of that truth the reader wants to take. The fact that the emperor was naked is in itself unrelated to the fact that the little boy wanted to expose him. Pragmatic considerations of desire, which form the content of the following chapter, demand a reconcilia- tion of the two areas for investigation, for the wishes of the little boy can only be determined when they are commun- icated and contextualised. The novel and more Specifically 48 the novels of Claude Simon are also open to a separate analysis as to the nature of their fiction. Consideration of novelistic illusion establishes the mode of portrayal particular to truth in the novel. Ricardou has described a parallelism in the novel between realism and the fantastic; each constitute an illusory image which veils the material presence of the words on the page. The nature of the illusion is in both cases hallucinatory: La saveur particuliere du fantastique vient de l'évidence de l'illusion: 1e lecteur gofite le corps HaIIucinatoire de ce qui n'a pas de corps. La saveur particuliére de réalisme vient de la méconnaissance de l'illusion: le lecteur gofite le corps hallucinatoire de ce qui a un corps réel. (...) Tout fasciné par l'hallucination des actes et choses, 1e lecteur ne se rend plus compte qu'il tourne les pages d'un livre: a l'usurpation de la matiére constituante COYrespond ITévaporation deEla matiére Signifiante.14 A further category of illusion is created in the new novel. It behaves in the same manner as those observed by Ricardou. The particular flavour of the new novel comes from the documentation of the illusion: the reader savours the “corps hallucinatoire de ce qui a un corps hallucina- toire." The text appears to signify nothing beyond the material and activity of signification. The novel, to the above extent, mimics theory, for disbelief is here indefin- itely suspended within the illusion of language as decidable truth. Pure theory is discourse at its most realistic, for it pursues knowledge directly in a world of observable 49 facts. The illusion of reference is never called into ques- tion; the abstraction of the illusion is preferred to the iconoclastic practice of self-knowledge, which is personal and uncomfortable rather than reassuringly universal. The novel even at its most realistic, has expressed a concern involuntarily perhaps, but always explicitly, for a degree of artistic self-awareness. A quotation from André’ Gide, inaccurate only in that it is predictive rather than pre- scriptive, is presented in ”Le facteur de la vérité” to illustrate the novel's independence from observables: Le roman prouvera qu'il peut peindre autre chose que la réalité - directement l'émotion et la pensée; il montrera jusqu'a quel point il peut étre déduit, avant l'expérience des choses - jusqu'a quel point c'est-a-dire i1 peut étre compose - c'est-a-dire oeuvre d'art. Il montrera qu'il peut étre oeuvre d'art, compose de toutes pieces, d'un realisme non des petits faits et contingents, mais supérieur. The narcissistic fascination in which illusion imbri- cates itself in the new novel calls into question Derrida's reading of truth; the illusion becomes an observable reality for itself. For the outside reader who reads language read- ing itself to itself, Derrida's position is reasserted. The novel's power of illusion is now only a representation of a particular language experiencing itself narrowly as unde- cidability. Interpolation of language as a veil between psyche and text will purview the wider truth of human beha- viour in its more varied semiosis. The reader, if he is to break the spell of the fiction, must situate the illusion phenomenologically as a consciousness of itself as other, 50 but not become lost in this preliminary step and experience himself as other. But novelistic illusion is invariably more powerful than anticipated. The superior realism lauded by Andre Gide has risked being atrophied into a set of received ideas because of a readerly readiness to appropriate undigested the similar- ities of a realistic text to one's own superior personal situation, passing glibly over the differences which might lead one out of narcissistic complacency. The new novel has revitalised readerly response on the one hand by abol- ishing the referential illusion. The little boy of The Emperor's New Clothes would be forced to read into his innocently shocked comment on the emperor's nudity an exper- ience of his own fears and desires, were he viewing the pa- rade through the eyes of the new novel. On the other hand readers of Claude Simon's novel freguently remain within the comfortably familiar fiction of language as a study in self-consciousness, where the novel behaves as theory. It is in the provision of this illusion as the path Of least readerly resistance that Simon's latest novels have done themselves their greatest disservice. NOTES 1 Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses (Paris: Gallimard, Le Livre de Poche, 1952), p. 334. 2 Roman/Cinema, Vol. I of Egbbe-Grillet: Anal se Theorie, Proc. of a Collo ue de Cerisy, 297Jun.-8 JuI. 1975 (Paris: U.G.E., 10/ 8, 976), p. 415. 3 Roman/Cinema, p. 415. 4 Roman/Cinema, p. 415. 5 Roman/Cinema, p. 414. 6 Roland Barthes, Le Degré zero de l'écriture (1953: rpt. Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 32. Henri Meschonnic, Pour la Poétigue (1969: rpt. Paris: Gallimard, N.R.F., 1970), p. I45. Marine Maisani-Léonard, Andre Gide ou l'ironie de l'écriture (Montreal: Les Presses ae I‘Universit e MontrEaI, 1976), p. 9. 9 RomanZCinéma, p. 10 10 Roman/Cinema, p. 391. My brackets give the antece- dent. 11 Philippe Sollers, "Le Roman et l'expérience des limites," Tel Ouel, no. 25 (1966), p. 31. 51 52 2 . 1 Gerald Prince, "Le Texte du Nouveau Nouveau Roman: Pour une Mise au Point," paper delivered at the annual MLA convention, New York, (1975), p. 4. 13 Prince, p. 4. 14 Problémes generaux, Vol. I of Nouveau Roman: hier, au'ourd'fiui, Proc. of a Colloque de Cerisy, 20-30 Jul. 1971 (Paris: U.G.E., 10/18, 1972), p. 229, my Brackets. 15 Problémes généraux, p. 29. 16 Pratiqpes, Vol. II of Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd'hui, pf_43. 17 Edmond Husserl, Mgditations Cartésiennes (Paris: Librairie Philosophigue J. Vrin, I969T7 p. 28. 8 Husserl, p. 28. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, N.R.F., 1966), p. 62. 20 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (1975: rpt. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, Cornell Paperbacks, 1976), p. 189. 21 Culler, p. 192, my brackets. 22 Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction 3 la littérature fantastique (Paris: SeuiITfl970), p.—2l. 23 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957: rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 132. 24 Culler, p. 194. 53 25 Roland Barthes, "L'effet de reel," Communications, 11 (1968). 87-8. 26 Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), p. 232, quoted in‘Euller, p._194. 27 Renato Barilli, ”Neutralisation et difference," in Roman/Cinema, p. 393. 23 Barilli, p. 395. 29 Barilli, p. 395. 30 Claude Simon: Analyse, Théorie, p. 344. 31 Ricardou, Jean, Le Nouveau Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 76. 2 Ricardou, p. 75. 33 Gerard Genette, “Vertige fixé" in Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 89. 34 Jacques Derrida, "Le facteur de la vérité," Poétique, 6, no. 21 (1975), p. 97. 35 Derrida, p. 99. 36 Derrida, p. 99. 37 Derrida, p. 99. 33 Derrida, p. 100. 39 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans, 0f Grammatolooy by Jacques Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974). PP. lxiii-lxiv. 54 40 Spivak, p. lxiv. 41 Derrida, p. 99. 42 Derrida, p. 98. 43 Derrida, p. 97. 44 Jean Ricardou, Nouveaux Problémes du roman (Paris: Seuil, 1978), p. 186. 45 Andre Gide, quoted by Derrida, p. 128. CHAPTER II ANALYSIS OF THE AUTHORIAL INTERLOCUTOR John Lyons introduces two criteria for a linguistic theory of semantics in Structural Semantics. These prere— quisites also pertain for the generation of a set of con- ditions competent to permit the constitution of the author- ial interlocutor in theory and its institution as a critical Operation. The authorial interlocutor should respect a stipulation of operational and material adequacy. Opera- tionally the interlocutor must provide a working model for the reading of Simon's novelistic production: "It must em? ploy concepts that are Operationally definable in terms of "1 Materially the interlocutor should empirical techniques. in its linguistic origins and literary orientation be sub- ject to refinement at least partially within the usual acceptation of the term. Otherwise the critic "will leave himself Open to criticism that he has indeed defined some- thing, but not what he set out to define."2 Conversely, the authorial interlocutor will be established by this prin- ciple as the correct nomenclature for that which has been defined. A resolution of the demands imposed by the requirement 55 56 of material adequacy may be achieved by examination of the authorial utterance at a selected location in the nexus of critical debate on discourse analysis and enunciation in the European tradition of post-Saussurian linguistics. Subse- quently, questions relating to the nature of subjectivity in discourse, and to the role of the utterance in this regard will be extrapolated from linguistics, where they are cur- rently under review, and integrated to the debate on liter- ary criticism versus poetics, where the vexed issue of sub- jectivity involves a reappraisal of interpretive tech- niques. Choice of the term interlocutor to describe the role of the indwelling author has been made possible by Tzvetan Todorov's use of the term in Dictionnaire encyglgpédique des sciences du langage to describe the constitutive ele- ments of the enunciative process: Les premiers elements constitutifs d'un proces d'énonciation sont: 1e locuteur, celui qui enonce; qui tou§ deux SOFE-HEEFES, indifféremment. interlocuteurs. Todorov implicitly eliminates the figure of the narra- tor from consideration as the source of utterance in the novel; the latter is described as an imaginary locutor, one presumably invented for the purposes of delegation: Le ”narrateur" d'un texte n'est en effet rien d'autre qu'un locuteur imaginaire, reconstitué a partir des elements verbaux qui s'y referent. Todorov does not investigate the origin of novelistic 57 interlocution other than in terms of the relationship be- tween the locutor and his allocutor, and characterises interlocution as self or other directed. As regards the isolation of a locutor assuming responsibility for the novel, it may be said to emerge from the relationship of an utterance to the assumption of responsibility for its emission: La production linguistique peut étre considérée: soit comme une suite de phrases, identifiée sans référence a telle apparition particuliére de ces phrases (elles peuvent étre dites, ou transcrites avec des écritures différentes, ou imprimées, etc.); soit comme un acte au cours duquel ces phrases s'actualisent, assumées par un locuteur particulier, dans des circon- stances spatiales et temporelles précises. Telle est l'opposition entre l'énoncé et la sitgation de discours, parfois appelée énonciation. The greatest difficulty in describing the locutor may be said to reside in what is to be understood by the assumption of the énoncé by the énonciation. The discursive situation taken broadly constitutes the context for the utterance, although Todorov prefers to reserve the term context for the strictly linguistic environment of the énoncé. The wider context of the utterance would entail a global overview of all circumstances affecting the linguis- tic production. When the literary text is read for what it may reveal about itself rather than in terms of more or less speculative extrinsic factors, account must be taken of the manner in which the text purveys truth, and of the literary and fictional nature of the insights thus gained. 58 The novels of Claude Simon pOpularise an early stage of semiological exegesis in which the locutor's role appears to be apprOpriated by the linguistic function of the utter- ance. Jean Dubois in his article "Enoncé et énonciation" describes the phenomenon with a double negation, the subject of the enunciation is unable not to reduce himself to the structure of the énoncé which he has emitted: "Le sujet est dominé par la structure d'un texte gu'il ne peut pas ne pas émettre ainsi. Des deux termes de l'opposition, l'énonce est valorisé: il est 1e reflet du proces d'énonciation dans sa totalité."6 Simon projects his work into methodology; as thespeaking subject migrates from his enunciation to the énoncé, becoming an example of language: "Le texte devient alors un jeu de transformations a partir d'une phrase type, un ludisme absolu ou le sujet est identifié a la structure elle-méme."7 As a consequence, communication becomes intelligible as a textual systematisation which may have little to do with the inherent properties of the novel form. Where the structuration of language is founded upon a binary Opposi- tion between presence and absence, inscription of the énonce may be taken, as Dubois remarks, to efface the Eggn- ciation: Mais les propriétés que l'on reconnaIt grace a ces concepts ne sont pas inhérentes a l'objet étudié, qui n'entre qu'imparfaitement dans ces categories, elles tiennent a la méthodologie‘ utilisée. 59 A Short circuit has been produced in the logic of the relationship between énoncé and énonciation, for each is now assuming responsibility for the other, leaving the postulate of an interlocutor in doubt. In order to clarify the posi— tion occupied by the authorial interlocutor in Simon's novels, a review of the notion of the énoncé will be under- taken with the goal of locating its organisation within a denotative order of intelligibility. The interlocutor may then be seen to occupy the space of connotation subtending the overt strategy of the narration. With the advent of transphrastic theories of discourse in the American tradition of distributional linguistics, the énoncé acquired its most flexible description. In 1951 Zellig Harris defined utterance as, ”any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the. part of that person."9 More problems are raised than solved in this rendition: the term utterance does not distinguish effectively the énoncé from its enunciation; neither silence nor the identity of the speaker is subjected to close scrun- tiny, and the problem of relating synchronic to diachronic temporality is impressionistically resolved; past, future and present are not rigorously delineated. Harris was to propose no more than a grammatical set of transformations for the concatenation of sentences in a transphrastic utter- ance. In the wake of Harris' pioneering endeavour, French 60 theorists were to extend the Opposition between énoncé and enunciation beyond the limits of the sentence. The for- malist tradition, with its bias towards generative grammar, became separate from a branch of research into enunciation, which has adopted the rubric of pragmatics. Together with a new interest in socio-linguistics, these fields are seen by Dominique Maingueneau to compose the major recent de- partures from Saussurian thought in the European tradition. Pragmatics owes its derivation to logical positivism, which imposed a tripartite schemafor linguistic activity. Syntax provides the study of the linguistic relationship between signs. Semantics relates to the logical connections between Sign and referent. Pragmatics, or enunciation, deals with the enunciative conditions which pertain to the linguistic items and their lOgical referents. Language is neatly separated into the respective domains of the sen- tence, proposition and énoncé. A problem of defining the latter term stems from the association of enunciation to pragmatics. Maingueneau suggests that the hesitancy inevitable in imposing a work- able definition of the énoncé lies in the indeterminacy of the interaction between linguistics and related disciplines: Or la linguistique a évidemment tendance a rejeter dans sa "pragmatigue" (l'énonciation) tous les facteurs qu'elle ne parvient ni a integrer (psycholoqie, sociologie, contexte...) ni a rejeter. La tentation est grande de donner a l'énonciation 1e statut d'une pragmatigue, sans remettre en cause la dé inition du syntaxique et du Semantique. 61 The collision of the expanding boundaries of linguis- tics with extra-linguistic forms has led to the develOpment of enunciation as an interim area destined to buttress existing areas of linguistic study and to apprOpriate neigh- bouring disciplines to form a pragmatics. Instead of pro- viding a buffer zone, enunciation has communicated its inde- terminate status to syntax and semantics, inviting a re- appraisal Of these categories. In December 1977, Pierre Ouellet published an article on the positivist categories of language, ”La scene énoncia- tive," in which he argues that semantics should be redefined to enfold both syntax and pragmatics. In response to the atomistic procedures which have characterised the reassess- ment of linguistic boundaries, Duellet proposes a global theory of semiogenesis, one which considers language not as a series of component parts, but as a function which traces the process of signification as a configuration of sentence, proposition and énoncé: Cette approche permet, au-delE de la prOposition au-dela de la phrase, au-dela méme de l'énoncé, de dresser les frontiéres d'une "situation énon- ciative" et de considérer tout discours comme un ensemble de situations énonciatives dont les frontiéres, strictes ou floues, ouvertes ou fermées, determinent des voisinages mais aussi des discontinuités - puisqu'il n'y a pas de situation énonciative constante dans le discours en langue naturelle, dont on peut definir le domaine comme un ensemble de bifurcations sur l'espace-temps d'une classe de situations énonciatives possibles.11 Ouellet's proposal is symptomatic of the disarray into 62 which traditional linguistic boundaries have been thrown by the advent of transphrastic analysis and by the departure from Saussurian practice. In the midst of a confusion as to what might constitute a satisfactory theory of enunciation, theoreticians such as Michel Pécheux and Pierre Kuentz re- ject the possibility of a return to the subject in dis- course, Maingueneau describes their attitude as a refutation of subjective freedom, of "l'autonomie du sujet, de la 'parole' libre."12 The reintroduction of an enunciative situation into pragmatics is subject to the proviso that the speaking sub- ject cannot himself originate meaning. Enunciation, whether considered singly as the pragmatics of illocution or cor- porately as the semantic value of sentence, prOposition and énoncé must maintain an independence from the intentionality of the speaking subject. The distinction made by de Saussure between meaning (langue) and usage (parole) was pre- dicated upon the Humpty-Dumptyan illusion that man is the master of meaning, that words can be moulded to convey the intentions of the speaker: "'When I use a word,‘ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less.‘ (...) 'The question is,‘ said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master - that's all.”13 Relegation of the subject's intentions to the status of irrelevance has served to focus attention on the relative importance of socio-historic context to 63 meaning. De Saussure's category of parole is abandoned; enunciation denotes, not the intentions of the speaking subject, but conditions of enunciation which may have a bearing upon communication: En réalité il s'agit de savoir 31 le lien entre le sens des phrases d'un texte et ses conditions socio-historiques est quelque chose de secondaire ou constitutif de ce sens méme, indépendamment de l'illusion que peut avoir 1e locuteur que la signification de 322 discours coincide avec ce qu'il 'veut dire". As a model typical of the relationship between meaning and socio—historic factors, Maingueneau selects that pro- posed by P. Charaudeau in "Etudes de linguistique appliquée? The enunciative situation serves to distinguish énoncé from discours: Enoncé + situation de communication = Discours usage - consensus spécificité sens signification -Autrement dit, 1e sens d'un enoncé est défini en dehors de tout cadre énoncIatIf, alors que sa signification est referee aux circonstances de communication qui en font un discours:1 Charaudeau's model is taken from pragmatics and is founded upon a modification of Saussurian principles. His theoretical position is crosscut by that of the French school of discourse analysis, seen by Maingueneau to be typified in the definition of L. Guespin: L'énoncé, c'est la suite des phrases émises entre deux blancs sémantiques, deux arréts de la commun- ication; le discours, c'est l'énoncé considéré du point de vue du mécanisme discursif qui le condi- tionne. Ainsi un regard jeté sur un texte du 64 point de vue de sa structuration en langue en fait un énoncé; une etude linguistique des con- ditions de production de ce texte en fera un dis- cours.16 Maingueneau proceeds to summarise the main features of the theories of Guespin and Charaudeau in order to illus- trate an ambiguity in the Opposition énoncé / discours, that of the relation of the conditions of production in the for- mer's description to the circumstances of communication in the latter's. Maingueneau views the ambiguity as an instru- ment for delimiting the horizons of context in everyday ver- sus specialised forms of communication. While Maingueneau's synopsis of linguistic pragmatics does outline a contextual distinction between énoncé and discours, his summary does not bear directly upon the defin- ition of the narrative énoncé envisaged in the present chap- ter, one which will relate current reflection on literary . pragmatics to the reading of Simon's later works. Whereas a contextual grammar of the énoncé can establish the enuncia- tive situation of the linguistic subject, it does not ad- dress the issue of the extra-linguistic subject of the enun- ciation, the authorial voice of the text. The notion of grammatical context may, however, be extrapolated from lin- guistics and linked to other disciplines. The notion of generic context is critical to a definition of the novel in terms of a literary pragmatics, for it establishes the con- ditions of possibility for such a definition. 65 In what Maingueneau terms as paralinguistic usage of the énoncé and discours, Michel Foucault seeks to re- assess the boundaries Of different modes of discourse, in- cluding the novel form. Foucault refers to the difference in enunciative function between novel and theory: Un énoncé a toujours des marges peuplées d'autres énoncés. Ces marges se distinguent de ce qulon entend d'ordinaire par "contexte" - réel on verbal - c'est-a-dire de l'ensemble des elements de situation on de langage qui motivent une formulation et en determinent les sens. Et elles S'en distinguent dans la mesure méme oh elles 1e rendent possible; le rapport contextuel n'est pas le méme entre une phrase et celles qui l'entourent Si on a afigire a un roman ou a un traité de physique. The reader who seeks to define Claude Simon's works as novels is not beset with many of the terminological ob- stacles which customarily confront generic distinctions, but he is forced to face the frontier of art with theory. For, theory, the authorial implication is negligible, whereas for the novel it is capital. In literature the wilful violation of factual accuracy is revealing of the speaker and evasive of observables. In Simon's novels, where art parrots theory, the message or authorial content represents the code or lin- guistic content. The impenetrability of the theorist is fused with the penetrability of the novelist, and the status of Simon's discourse remains undecidable. Structuralist readings usually treat Simon's work as a pure representation of the linguistic encoding process, since the transparency of the theoretical statement invokes 66 a collectivised reading public, with little possibility for individual variance. In contradistinction to Barthes' cate- gories of ”1e lisible” and ”1e scriptible” in literature, introduced in S/Z,18 Barthes elsewhere suggests that liter- ature automatically supposes a degree of Opacity or "writer- liness”, in that it is self-referential. Literature points out its mask, by the formula larvatus prodeo. Barthes' term "19 is nonetheless provocative in that it con— "le scriptible jures up a picture of the reader as writer. Investigation of the relationship between reader and literary text yields an analogy with writerly activity, in that the reader of literature exercises a degree of interpretive choice. Norman Holland focuses upon reading in Poems in Persons as a transaction between reader and text, a form of holistic inference in which the reader becomes individualised as a constant factor projected upon the variability of the text: "Particular insights and interpretations, too, proceed from habitual patterns of ego choices."20 Holland modifies this position by stating that a correct reading does not depend on the choice of the reader, but on the range of possible readings made available by the text: ”Different readers can interpret the same text very differently and still remain within the range of correct- ”21 Holland is concerned to define the limits within ness. which the literary transaction, or reading process occurs. His analysis provides the insight that a correct reading 67 will be incomplete, due to the limitations of habitual choice. Applied to a structuralist reading of Claude Simon's works, Holland's criterion furnishes the conclu- sion that in order for such a reading to be correct, Simon's text cannot be accorded the description of novel, because the structuralist approach does not fulfill a condition of incompleteness. But for the novel to be con- sidered as theoretical discourse it would have to be infin- itely perforable, fully transparent, permitting only a com- plete reading and no critic of Simon insists consistently upon this point. If Simon's works are to be understood as novels, then they may be taken to reveal a condition of ”writerliness', Opening the way to a consideration of liter- ary pragmatics in his novels. Consideration of Simon's works as primarily novelistic is, however, a direction contrary to that of the prevailing wind of Simonian criticism, and should, in the interests of material adequacy, be approached through the latter direc- tion. In the most recent novels of Claude Simon the autonomy of the code is taken as axiomatic. Ricardou says of La Bataille de Pharsale that the work writes itself, ”c'est a "22 partir de lui-méme qu'il se compose; the text is accorded generative properties in addition to its quality of inani- mate object. More recently Klaus Hempfer, Speaking from the standpoint of novelistic criticism, has evinced surprise at 68 the flagrancy of modern critics' flouting of the hallowed canons of critical practice: Indem der scri teur jedoch gleichzeitig als "fragment textueI' betrachtet wird, ergibt sich hier, wie beim traditionellen Biographismus, nur in entgegengesetzter Richtung, die ffir eine Texttheorie fatale Identifizierung zweier grundsatzlich verschiedener Kategorien, was u.a. zu der absurden Konsequenz ffihrt, dass das "je textuel” zum ”producteur du texte" wird, dass einen "étre de papier", wie Barthes treffend den ErzShler bestimmt also 'productive' Eigenschaften zugeschrieben werden. Absurd as this consequence may be to Hempfer, it is necessary if the message is considered as a theoretical aspect of the code. The message must be interiorised, assumed into the body of the text. From the moment that a perfect consonance or transparency exists between the syn- tactic and semantic levels of communication, where the images and concepts signified by the text are a faithful re- flection of the Signifying process that endangers them, the text appears to be depersonalised, leaving the medium as the content. The signifier is taken to be the code and the sig- nified the message. Such is the distinction proposed by Lucien Dallenbach in his study on mise en abyme: Le Recit spéculaire. He distinguishes usage of the term ”code" in criticism from its linguistic acceptation by suggesting a necessary rela- tionship between code and message in literature: En littérature, en effet, la relation code/ message est spécifique en ce sens que le code apparait indissociable du message qui l'integre, alors que, dans tout autre type de discours, 69 i1 lui préexiste en tant que convention entre émetteur et récepteur, ou systéme de signaux permettant la transmission de l'information. Ainsi S'explique que la littérature ait pu étre considérée tantOt comme un message sans code, tantOt comme un code sans message - et que dans l'acception on nous le prenons ici, code désigne la possibilité consentie au récit de définir ses signes par ses signes meme et d'expliciter ainsi son mode d'Opération. Dallenbach's position is representative of structura- list theory in narratological studies. This opposition be- tween message and code is broadly similar to those commonly cited between fabula (story) and szujet (plot) in the Russian formalist tradition, mythos and logos in Aristote- lian poetics, showing or telling or mimesis and diegesis in Platonic terms and elsewhere referred to as histoire and discours (Todorov) or récit and narration (Barthes). Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse adopts this Opposie tion for his title, and refines it further by reintroducing the Saussurian and Hjelmslevian quadrapartition: expression and content, form and substance. The different interpreta- tions given to these terms and their interrelations have in common the treatment of a work of art as a pragmatically closed text. Shlomith Rimmon in "A comprehensive theory of narrative” sketches a typology sensitive to the nuances of nomenclature in the various semiotic models; his concern is to situate Genette's seminal work on narratology, Figures III, in the context of existing studies as a poetics rather than a criticism. 70 Criticism, he (Genette) says, is essentially and traditionally concerned with the dialogue between an individual text and a psyche, whether conscious or unconscious, individual or collec- tive, creative or receptive. This traditional concern is somewhat changed by Structuralism which insists on treating the work as a closed, accom- plished and absolute object, ignoring its dia- logue with any extra-textual psyche. 5 The principle of closure is endemic in structuralism. Jean Piaget's three criteria for Structure, "wholeness, n26 transformation, and self-regulation accepts that a struc- "27 Accept- ture is "a system closed under transformation. ance of the novel as a structure of this sort is commonly taken to necessitate an exclusion of the desires of the interpreter. In an implicit demurral, Wolfgang Iser, in The Implied Reader, refers to the twentieth-century novel as one in which the reader embarks upon a voyage of self-discovery; "the reader is forced to discover the hitherto unconscious expectations that underlie all his perceptions."28 Inge Relation critique Jean Starobinski asks whether it is not reasonable to hold that the self-reflexibility of interpre- tation is the primary goal of interpretative discourse: N'est-il pas légitime que le discours interpre- tatif soit d'abord indicatif de soi, qu'il se pose lui-méme, s'affirme selon son style, son ordre et sa possibilité et que l'objet étudié lui soit l'occasion de prouver ses prOpres pouvoirs, ses qualités spécifiques? 9 Anthony Wilden performs a critique of structure in System and Structure which seeks to account for the 71 interpretive gesture in terms of the different orders of logic which govern digital and analog computation. In a chapter entitled ”The Structure as Law and Order" he eva- luates Piaget's conception of structure as being analogous to de Saussure's visualisation of the game of chess. De Saussure holds that change or transition does not belong to the equilibrium of states of affairs and that only the lat- ter are of importance. Wilden points out that structures are commonly taken to establish their own boundaries or cOntours, rather than being seen as defined by their con- text or background of mobility, in this case the desires of the chess player: Thus, each player's move in chess are (Sic) the momentary digitalizations which allow the game to pass from analog pattern to pattern. And since the moves do not belong to the patterns, they cannot be explained simply by reference to the patterns (the 'structures'). They can only be explained by reference to the context of meaning in which the game is played, that is to say, by reference to the DESIRE or to the goals of the chess player. For it is the moves of the player, and not the state of the board, which define the boundary he crosses as he communicates each difference, each move, as a message to his opponent. Wilden believes that all communication involves both digital and analog systems and hence that semiotics entails each within the context of the other. Viewed from either perspective, analog or digital, structure must involve both a controlled and a random element. Language must at some level admit the irreducible presence of a message couched 72 in terms of the desires of a subjectivity if Wilden's principle is to be observed. The énoncé in narrative should be defined both in terms of a transition and an equili- brium, of flesh and of paper, irrespective of its status as theory or literature. Recent attempts to traverse the impasse into which the speaking subject has been consigned in post-Saussurian thought have been contingent upon a transgression of the main tenet of the theory of enunciation: they have returned to Saussurian categories of the speaking subject or to no subject at all. Analysis of Gilles Deleuze's projection of an enunciative Situation in Logigue du sens will under- line the inadequacy of such procedures and indicate a poss- ible alternative. Deleuze is concerned with the problem of meaning in language rather than with the implications of his work for linguistics; dissatisfied with the tripartite posi- tivist model, he proposes a strategic fourth dimension, that of meaning (sens). Deleuze invokes a set of criteria for the sentence, proposition and énoncé based on the principle of truth. The proposition (designation) is either true or false, depending upon the correct identification of an ob- ject of reference. The énoncé (manifestation) is founded upon the reliability of the Speaker. The sentence (Signifi- cation) is founded upon a condition for truth: the words must correspond to a coherent concept. Deleuze admits a fourth category of language, that of meaning (sens). He 73 allows meaning to give evidence as a separate dimension of linguistic representation since he cannot establish a hierarchy of precedence within the tripartite system. Deleuze cites the Saussurian opposition between RSI £213 and langue to demonstrate the reversibility of privi- lege to accrue to the domains of manifestation and signifi- cation. Parole grants the exercise of meaning to the speak- ing subject; langue to the spoken word. In discussing the primacy of signification over designation Deleuze argues the impossibility of a total independence of the former from the latter. LOgic proceeds by the derivation of conclusions from premises. A premise must be taken to be true in order for it to be valid as a condition for truth. A conclusion can never absolutely detach itself from its premises, a proof is always both a process of deduction and a resultant conclusion. The accuracy of a designation does not rely upon the tenability of a logic argument, since it already serves to verify the premises. The designation only relies upon the signification to demarcate the conditions of poss- ibility for truth. An absurd statement does not permit the postulation of truth; it is equally true and false. Solely in the presence of absurdity does the sigpification manifest an independence from designation. In the absence of a clear attribution of meaning to any one dimension of language, meaning (sens) is taken by Deleuze to reflect an interactive level of intelligibility. 74 He explains meaning by reference to the Husserlian notion of expression, especially noematic perception, summarising Husserl's pages on "Noesis and Noema” in Ideas. The marri- age of semantics and phenomenology is achieved by Deleuze at the expense of suppressing the pragmatic category of subjectivity. In expressing meaning as such, the inten- tionality of the subject disappears, only the smile of the Cheshire cat remains, devoid of interpretive context. Pragmatics had as early as 1938, in Charles Morris' definition, focused upon a relationship between signs and their users: "Since most, if not all signs have as their interpreters living organisms, it is a sufficiently accu- rate characterisation of pragmatics to say that it deals "31 Morris' description with the biotic aspects of semiosis. has survived almost intact in more recent studies: Umberto Eco in A Theory of Semiotics modifies Morris' point of view by stating that the human addressee ”is the methodological (and not the empirical) guarantee of the existence of a signification, that is of a Sign function established by a code."32 It may be deduced from Eco's definition that a Sign must have a guarantor if it is to be said to exist. The addressee or interpreter must receive the sign as a message. Moreover, the sender is necessarily a receiver if he is to guarantee the existence of a message, in other words to perceive the message as such. It is in the context of the speaker as interpreter 75 that Suzanne Cunningham has pursued a possible relation between phenomenology and semiotics. Cunningham rejects a consideration of semantics as reflecting a parallel be- tween the structure of language and that of the world, remarking the failures of Russell and Wittgenstein to con- struct such an equivalence. She accepts a relation of prag- matics and syntactics to Husserlian thought. Cunningham pursues the distinction between hearer and speaker in pragmatics from the perspective that only the latter actually constitutes the text: "In language-use consciousness is functioning in a constitutive capacity, taking part in the genetic constitution of language itself and bestowing meaning on its own experience as it objecti— fies it.”33 The dual function of the speaker is taken by Cunningham to permit a visualization of the text as a meet? ing ground for speaker and hearer: "At stake, (...), is simply the fact that language provides the common ground on which the constitutive interpreter (Husserl's transcendental subject) meets the interpretation of the 'other', the trans- cendent."34 The study of this common ground is syntactics, a science of the transcendent Sign divorced from the trans- cendental subjectivity which guarantees the existence of signification. The area in which Cunningham's argument leaves the most unspoken, lies in her subscription to the Saussurian cate- gories of langue and parole. Her investigation of the 76 speaker's relation to pragmatics tends to Obscure a possi- ble differentiation between the activity of constitution and that of interpretation. In her discussion of syntactics the tOpic becomes more thoroughly confused, signs are des- cribed as fully transcendent, yet retaining their aspect as a transcendental field: A Sign is a sign only insofar as it is constituted as such. Thus the signs themselves bear a necess- ary relation (at least at their commencement) to a constituting consciousness, i.e. to a transcen- dental subjectivity. However, linguistic Signs can be given both shape and sound. This brings them immediately into the realm of the spatio- temporal, the transcendent."35 Signs are taken to function in subjective and objective dimensions as in Saussurian linguistics. The regression from Morris' model to that of de Saussure might have been avoided had Cunningham rigourously assigned the act of con- stitution and its constituent signs to the transcendent, and the interpreter with his interpretation to the transcenden- tal field. Such a postulation would suppose that the speak- er as constitutive interpreter, and not the signs them- selves, is always transcendent and transcendental, both self and other. Support may be adduced for this position from Husserl's regionalisation of consciousness within intention- al experience: "For it is easily seen that not every real phase of the concrete unity of an intentional experience has itself the basic character of intentionality, the prOpertv of being a 'consciousness of something'."36 A clear distinction between pragmatics and syntactics 77 may now be reimposed from a methodological perspective. Syntactics retains its aspect as a science of transcendent sign function established as a code. Pragmatics, the rela- tion between Signs and consciousness, studies the guarantee or contract between interpreter and message. Acknowledgement of the dual role of the author, part interpretation, part inscription makes full allowance for the representation of authorial consciousness within the literary work. If pragmatics is a science of the relation- ship Of message to interpreter, then it englobes interpre- tation on two levels. The first relates to the meta-dis- course established between reader and text, the interpretive activity of textual analysis. This dimension lies beyond the text, it is the transaction performed by an extra-tex- tual psyche. The second level is that of the textual au- . thor, a co-presence of the semiotic code and the indwelling interpreter. The latter domain is the province of literary pragmatics, which deals with the "dialogue between the indi- vidual text and a psyche" as does criticism, but like poe- tics, it ignores a "dialogue with any extra-textual psyche". Simon appears determined to reduce the enunciative content of his works to the logic of pure lucidity, a lack of any interpretive behaviour. A pragmatic reading of the énoncé in Simon's work implies a characterisation of desire as absence. It is not sufficient to state that absence functions as pure negation, this attitude would defeat the 78 purpose of a literary definition of the énoncé by suppressing the category of interpreter. Simon's works succeed in creating the illusion of ab- sence by rendering the interpreter invisible. The pragma- tic category of the literary author, the internalised con- stitutive interpreter, disappears from Simon's novels through the mise en abyme of the literal dimension by its referential counterpart. The precise means by which the disappearance is effected belongs to a discussion of the conditions for operational adequacy which govern the pre- sent definition of the authorial interlocutor as a textual immanence. To postulate the eventuality of such a vanish- ing act requires an explanation of the method by which the novel form practices the illusion of trompe l'oeil. The undecidability of Simonian praxis as novel or theory may be resolved by reference to the expectations of the reader rather than to the semantic aspect of novelistic fiction. Siegfried J. Schmidt examines the respective claims for fictivity versus fictionality of the novel form in PA pragmatic interpretation of fictionality". He con- cludes that the semantic or fictive value of a possible world represented in literary form is not a decisive factor in determining fictionality. A fictive statement is one which is neither true nor false: it can potentially but not actually be corroborated by observation. A fictional state- ment involves pragmatic considerations of intentionality or 79 belief on the part of the constitutive interpreter, such as wishful thinking and deliberate or non-deliberate error. A novel can only be truly fictional if it is read as such, if the reader anticipates authorial inexactitude. Schmidt refers his reader to socially institutionalised convention as the relevant criterion for the attribution for fiction- ality to authorial intention. He quotes L. Gustafsson's discussion of the pragmatic nature of novelistic fiction: One of the novel's most important qualities is not borne by it in itself as part of its inner structure, but as a relation between the reader and the historical condition of the text as a whole. To be a novel is a claim which the novel carries with its being represented as a novel from the beginning, and from the start it prescribes a certain attitude to the reader, different from that which the reader takes towards memories and other documentary texts. Gustafsson's argument is convincing but not conclusive, for as in the statement "a rose is a rose is a rose", there exists a constant refutation of change. Schmidt concludes his article by a reference to the avant-garde and its desire to break away from tradition. Frye holds that it is not possible to abdicate from convention. The later works of Claude Simon provide a testing ground for Frye's thesis, for they are commonly taken to be both non-fictional and novelistic. Schmidt's category of fictionality is extrinsic to the literary text. Only in a fictional environment can the text be considered as fictive and also possess a truth 80 value. The text then achieves literary status: By 'fictive world' I mean: a fictive world Wfif is a world or world system which a reader assihns to a text in the context of literary communica- tion, respecting the norm - provided by the fic- tionality principle - according to which the Objects and states of affairs in any w? have not actually been the case in Fw (our normal world system of experience) at the time of text produc- tion and that the author did, respectively does, not3§ssert them to actually be the case in his EW. As Schmidt himself indicates, his explanation does not exhaust the debate on literarity. He surmises that the reader can only decode the fictive world by a comparison with his normal world. The case for fictivity in a non- fictional environment is, therefore, more complex. Here the fictive world has no literary status. Theoretical dis- course purports to be objective or non-literary, but since the fictivity of pure theory cannot be distinguished from the real world by a principle of fictionality, the reader is unable to assess the Objectivity of the theoretical world, and must accept the claim of theory to be fully transparent. Approached from a different perSpective, that of Wilden, which holds that all language conveys intentional- ity, the distinction between literature and theory becomes one of internal levels of intelligibility. Whereas a theo- retical statement attempts to remain pure, or silent about its intentions, even though it must connote them, literature directly indicates its intentions to the reader, it 81 manifests its own intrinsic fictionality by denoting the pragmatic dimension of the text. This approach improves on that of Schmidt in that it concerns itself with the dynamics of literary rather than readerly pragmatics, and is sensitive to the self-definitional role of the text. Assuming that Simon's works are to be read as novels, the apparent absence of an internal pragmatic dimension, a textual author, must be closely reviewed. It is the apprehension of an immanent authorial voice which provides a yardstick for fictivity in terms of fictionality. The reader who approaches the novel in the expectation of en- countering a fictional environment must come into contact with a fictive world visibly created and sustained as such within the text, otherwise he is left in the unenviable position of reading an impossible novel, a novel which is not. A novel in which his expectations are unfulfilled is a form of theory in that it is characterised by a transpar- ent, or invisible enunciative structure. The principle of opacity or self-exposure in authorial intention is excluded from the reader's appreciation of the text. In order to make a distinction between fictionality and novelistic fiction, it is more accurate to define the former term in literary pragmatics as literariness. Once Schmidt's category of fictionality is taken to be intrin- sic to the text, it implies that the latter actually is both fictive and literary. The text is no longer merely expected 82 to be such. Teun A. van Dijk endorses this description of liter- ariness in ”Pragmatics and poetics". He offers an informal rule which reflects a criterion of authorial intention. The speaker intends to change the hearer's sense of reality by having him recognize this very intention in the text: The speaker wants, and by uttering a literary discourse intends, to change the evaluation set of the bearer with respect both to the represented events and objects and the structure of the discourse itself, and waggs him to recognize (...) this intention. Narrative fiction refers to a specific dimension of literariness in which the self-exposure of the author is performed in a Spirit of deceit. It is in order to prac- tice deception upon the reader that the author reveals his literariness in the text. Application of this principle, which is that of verisimilitude, to Simon's works, raises the question as to whether his text preserves a neutral theoretical posture, or imitates this attitude by imposing the fiction that his work is not literary. In the latter case his work will yield evidence of fiction through the manifestation of neutralised literary levels foreign to theory. The text will thus prescribe itself as narrative fiction rather than theory, even if it does not correspond to traditional generic classifications; Simon's novels es- chew such conventional descriptive characteristics as the presence of a coherent plot, well-drawn characters, and relevant settings. To ascertain the literariness of Simon's 83 works, the four conditions of enunciative transparency proposed by H. Grice in ”Logic and conversation" may be applied in reverse. Van Dijk describes the violation of Grice's principles in terms of their absence, the Speaker is overtly not accurate, not concise, not relevant or not lucid: (l) the speaker very often says something which he knows to be false in the actual world (QualitY): (2) the speaker often gives much more information than seems to be required for the interpre- tation of the text, e.g. a story (long novels with elaborate descriptions or digressions: paradigmatic cases: Tristram Shandy and A la recherche du temps perdu); or the speaker gives much too little information, e.g. in brief, semi-grammatical, semi-incoherent poems (Ouantity); (3) the literary discourse as a whole is not (directly) related to the actual world of speaker or hearer in many cases, whereas parts of the discourse may, apparently, be totally unrelated with other parts (Relation); (4) the literary discourse, typically it seems, is often obscure, ambiguous, prolific, repetitive, etc. (Manner).40 The opacity of authorial intention which is manifested by the fulfillment, partial or otherwise, of the above conditions indicates the literariness of a text. The case of the novel is somewhat more complex due to the admixture of fiction. The reader of Simon's novels is led to perceive his fictive environment as an absence of literariness. The apparent lucidity, concision, accuracy and relevance of the discourse assures its transparency or completeness. As a consequence of this economy of narration, the 84 novel is imbued with the appearance of theory. The struc- tural wholeness of the communication imparts an impersonal attitude to authorial intention. The Speaker is a replica of all other theorists. The particular circumstance of the novel is transformed into an instance of all theoretical texts. Francois Laruelle's discussion of Derridean general text reveals the principle of interchangeability as a re- duplication. Les simulacres textuels ne s'ajoutent pas au texte, mais fonctionnent comme la généralité textuelle immanente (...) 1e simulacre est l'hybris comme mesure qui vaut de toute valeur, le texte général avec leguel compose tout autre texte (Freud, Platon, Saussure, Heidegger), mais de telle sorte qu'a y étre articulé i1 y soit ré-pété, ré-cité, dé-limité, clivg comme series d'effets dans le texte général. 1 The apparent lack of literary qualities in Simon's fiction renders an application of van Dijk's conditions more difficult, for the absence of literariness may be a fiction. The presence of theoretical discourse cannot sim- ply be deduced from the absence of contrary indications. Discovery of the enunciative function to be either literary or not is contingent upon the structuration of the narrative énoncé. Imposition of a physical topography on the text necessitates the delineation of contours, boundaries which define the nature of the control exerted by the author over his text. Simon's later works are remarkable for the degree of auto-reflexivity displayed by the text. A description of the material qualities of the énoncé reveals the redundancy 85 with which a transparency of discourse is attained. The narrative énoncé is a textual segment supplying a part or component of the whole novel. In accordance with the principle of self-prescription, each novel formulates the interrelation of its own constituent elements. Van Rossum-Guyon notes this propensity in La Bataille de Phar- gglg. "Chaque roman nouveau propose précisément des pro- cédés nouveaux (ainsi, par exemple La Bataille de Parsale (...) par rapport aux textes precedents de Claude Simon (...))."42 The work of Claude Simon has progressively intensified its focus on the encoding process of the énoncé. Every novel may be taken to reflect a different stage in the progression. A study of the exact configuration Of the énoncé in Simon's work is best incorporated into the analy- sis of each particular novel, although a preliminary typo- logical survey will delimit the semiotic habitat of the énoncé. The finite limits of the énoncé are marked by points of disjunction along the itinerary of the signifier, seman- tic blanks which demarcate the moment of transition between two states of affairs. These states are generally series of sentences, although the latter term invokes a sense of diacritical markings which are of secondary importance. Simon himself has noted that punctuation is an editorial task that he performs with his editor after the completion of the novel. Nevertheless, most of the points of 86 disjunction in his text do occur at natural syntactic breaks. Disjunction can, however, function within the cate- gories of the signifier, the signified, and between the two dimensions. Barilli's article "Neutralisation et Difference" pre- sents the major areas for segmentation, "écarts differen- tiels" in the new novel as intra-littéral, littéral, SEEKS" 43 linguistique. These terms are not intended for method- ological precision but for illustration. Hence, EEEES’ littéral refers to the anagrammatic and paragrammatic per- mutations which occur in Sollers, £215 and H at the micro- structural level of the signifier, that of lexeme and mor- pheme. Littéral describes the Ricardolian theory of genera- tors, mots clefs which progress through a series of lexical redistributions and transformations and serve as points of departure around which series of anecdotes may be con- structed. Pharsale, according to Ricardou, is an anagram for the text in progress. His article rereads Simon's title as ”La bataille de la phrase". Ricardou examines the rela- tionship between signified and signifier, linking the refer- ential dimension of the stories woven around Pharsale to the organising or plotting function of the literal dimension, La phrase. Extra-linguistique is exemplified by Robbe- Grillet's insistence upon the importance of transition be- tween signifieds. Barilli contrasts Ricardou's article on 87 Projet pour une revolution 3 New York, "La Fiction flam- boyante"?4 in which Ricardou analyses the generative power of words such as £2332 as it migrates to grgug, £2323, ggggg in different narrative sequences, with Robbe-Grillet's explicit preoccupation with images of blood, fire and revo— lution containing the concept of redness, but independently of the term £2333. Barilli's comparison indicates that the énoncé is not necessarily an isolated segment, but that paradigmatic crosscutting and overlapping is permissible. A single énoncé may be analysed on different, mutually redundant levels, as evidenced by the discussion of the sign as liEI Egral and extra-linguistique. The distribution of the points of disjunction which limit the énoncé imparts an air of artificiality to the development of the story line. The passage from énoncé to énoncé is in general motivated by apparently randOm colli- sion of forms or concepts rather than by psycholocy. The énoncés seem to associate syntactically or semantically rather than on a pragmatic plane. Similarities between words or images appear more important than purposeful be- haviour. The énoncé present an aggregate of fragments in motley disorder, a modern version of the "tale told by an "45 The idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. story lines, each involving an exposition, development and denouement, are deformed by the inconsistency of 88 disjunctive activity. Reconstitution of the narratives would involve plotting a graph of discontinuous fragments, arrested moments of development. valéry's image of Zeno's arrow serves as an introductory quotation to La Bataille de Pharsale. The traiectory of the anecdotes is to be viewed as a succession of motionless moments, in which teleological momentum is absent, a flight of arrows suspended in mid-air viewed successively at various points in their journey. The itinerary of each arrow can only be inferred, it is not made explicit. The temporal and Spatial dislocation of the story line, analysed extensively by Ricardou in his article on disco- herence in Les Corps conducteurs and Triptyque, presupposes at least one form of continuity, that in the pages of the text in the Minuit editions is to be found a consistent pattern from left to right and from tOp to bottom of each page. This convention of reading, explored by Ricardou in «46 , again his article on Flaubert, "23 Natura Fictignis appears in his study of the endoxenic properties of Simon's work.47 It is a perspective which confines him, perhaps in a spirit of analogy, to a principle of linearity: the énoncés succeed each other spatially in contiguous if not coherent fashion. In contrast, Simon's latest work, Legon de Choses, has been analysed from the perspective of contextual asso- ciation by Francois Jost in"Les Aventures du lecteur: His 89 method, which he describes as contextual telestructuration, supposes that a metaphorical association between points of disjunction may span an indefinite number of intervening énoncés. The connoted association guarantees contiguity of the two énoncés on a level of metaphor, one at which the intercalated énoncés are no longer present. His model is derived from an earlier article on telestructural metonymic association in "Les téléstructures dans l'oeuvre de Robbe- Grillet" where he views the énoncé as a plane rather than a line, a two-dimensional surface in which the sequence of énoncés viewed by the reader of the text appears continuous but is in reality a number of énoncés distributed across a surface. Here any two énoncés may be contiguous if their metonymic association is of a different denotative order from that which connects them to their adjacent fellow in the body of the text. Simon's later works permit the simultaneous application of the models of Jost and Ricardou. The redundancy evident amongst the competing levels of the linguistic sign is here repeated as the otiose co-presence of different structures of enunciative transmission at a given level. The orderly consecution of the énoncés becomes entangled in a skein of superimposed frames, each permitting a correct but partial reading. In this manner the text reveals itself both as liter- ature and as fiction. The lack of enunciative concision 90 creates the possibility of readings which are mutually irrelevant and incoherent as a combined structure. The mutual irreducibility of the varied structurations of the énoncé obeys a principle of pleonasm inherent in van Dijk's final three conditions for literariness. Presence of the literary mode in turn implies that a falsification of art as theory has occurred, it supposes that van Dijk's first condition is present as a principle of polarisation. Simon's works may be apprehended as novels by the application of simultaneous and incompatible readings. In- terpretation of each novel as the proffering of a particular instance of fiction requires a method for apprehending the enunciative structure in pragmatic terms as the trajectory of authorial desire. Simon's novels present a coherent Wildenian structure in that the neutralisation of literary levels is accompanied by the suppression of the subjective impulse. Desire is characterised as inconsistent or disjunctive: the underly- ing attraction to harmony or conjunction present only as a synthesis of disjunction. Inconsistency is maintained as a series of encounters between irreconcilable urges. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari present their article "La synthése disjonctive” as not being a commentary on Klossowski, a gesture symptomatic of schizoid personality, the subject of the article. Their definition of schizo- phrenic behaviour is analogous to the attitude of Simon's 91 textual author, who is inscribed in his works as a series of discontinuous movements, related in their mutual contra- diction: Dans le processus schizophrenigue, les objets partiels, organes du desir, s'accrochent sur le corps sans organes. Lui, l'improductif, l'inconsommable, va servir de surface pour l'enregistrement de tout le procés de la production désirante et de la distribution opérée dans ce procés, les organes-machines, soit détraqués, soit en bon état, vont s'in- scrire ici, se suspendre comme des porte-manteaux sur le corps sans organes, comme la cravate ou la ceinture sur le corps rond d'Humpty- Dumpty. Ils s'inscrivent comme autant de points de disjonction entre lesguels se tissent tout un réseau de syntheses.48 Neutralisation of desire is effected by a process which mirrors the obfuscation of literary gualities in Simon's later works. The migration between narrative voices, be- tween spatio-temporal perspectives and points of view, creates an illusion of disjunction. Their passage leaves a residue of reduplicated interests and affective gestures, indicated by obsessional returns to preferred words and images. As in the mirror image, the categories of tautolo- gy and polarisation are now reversed in significance. Whereas the polarising force of the énoncé determines the nature of the illusion perpetrated on the reader by the topography of the text, the reduplicative power of the énoncé allegorises the configuration of authorial desires through the recurrence of certain thematic elements. If Simon's wishes were those of a theorist condemned 92 to write novels, one would expect his images to dramatise his concerns as schizophrenically disjunctive: Ce serait méconnaitre cet ordre de pensée que de faire comme si le schizophrEne substituait aux disjonctions de vagues syntheses d'identi- fication des contradictoires, comme 1e dernier des philosophes hégéliens. Il ne substitue pas des syntheses de contradictoires aux synthéses disjonctives, mais a l'usage exclusif et limi- tatif de la synthése disjonctive, il substitue un usage affirmatif, il est et reste dans la disjonction.49 As a novelist uninterested in theory, Simon might be considered to be performing a ritual act of exorcism to relieve him from his compulsion to express. Expression of this urge finds solace in the illusion that the self has been disseminated and desire for the other fulfilled. Rene Girard qualifies the articulation of desire as a remedy for the death which desire implies: "The ultimate meaning of desire is death but death is not the novel's ultimate mean- ing. The demons like raving madmen throw themselves into the sea and perish. But the patient is cured."50 Simon's theoretical stance as a novelist indicates divided loyalties, a division which projects man as torn be- tween the affirmation of curative and self-divisive alterna- tives. The first offers him an opportunity to vent his sense of lifelessness upon the words he employs. He relives his desire for change by imprinting the macula of his otherness upon the text. Desecration of the transcendent sign releases vitality in a manner akin to Samuel Beckett's visualisation of Purgatory: 93 Hell is the static lifelessness of unrelieved viciousness. Paradise the static lifelessness of unrelieved immaculation. Purgatory a flood of movement and vitality released by the con- junction of these two elements. Beckett's view of modern art in "Three Dialoques" sheds a different light on the remedial liberation of activity from its confining flood-gates. The cure envisaged by Girard does not drive out the demons perforce, it has its corollary in continued suffering, as though occasioned by the withholding of extreme unction. The patient has not now been freed, but is condemned to live in a purgatorial envir- onment. He exists as other for the self, obliged to express the rantings of his familiars in an environment to which he brings the total lack of resources of an outsider: "The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express."52 Purgatory is the locus of a vitalising conjunction of elements, a life-giving source: it may also sequester the sufferer in a living death, the claustration of the dis- junctive synthesis, as both monk and beast. Images of crea- tion and extinction, extreme meanings of desire, are fre- quent in Simon's works, matched in a counterpoint of accept- ance and denial. The shape of authorial desire is generated by the mediating function of the narrative énoncé, which connects 94 the twin systems of the text, tOpOgraphical distribution and interpretive motivation. The énoncé itself serves as a synthesis of discontinuous agents, imparting the consonance of constitutive interpretation to the separate components of physical configuration and teleological intention. Some- what audaciously, the task of the énoncé might be compared to a labour of love, the idealised role of the rainbow bridge summoned by the imagination of "argaret in Howards End: a symbol of union between the prose and the passion of human expression: Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless frag- ments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire.53 In the spirit of Forster's introductory admonition to the reader, "Only connect....", the method prOposed for an appreciation of the énoncé in Simon's later works is a com- parative reading of the énoncé. The structural poles of the énoncé, stasis and mobility, are interlinked by their depen- dency on each other. Neither is self-sufficient, and so each is connected to the other in that it contains the other's virtual presence as an absence, a deficit of inte- grity. Absence can furnish the utility of what is present, as preached from the origins of philosophy in the doctrine of Taoism. Lao-Tzu illustrates the cooperative potential 95 of presence and absence, indicating the hole in the wheel's hub, the hollow encircled by the pot, the emptiness of doors and windows: as in Wilden's analysis of the game of chess, instrument and purpose unite as indispensable count- erparts: Thirty Spokes are united around the hub to make a wheel, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the carriage depends. Clay is molded to form a utensil, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the pot depends. Doors and windows are cut out to make a room, But it is on its non-being that the utility of the room depends. Therefore turn being into advantage, and turn non-being into utility.54 A more recent demonstration of the interaction between presence and absence, the Eucharist, is described by Louis Marin in Les figpres du discours in a manner which suggests the discursive operation of the narrative énoncé. The bread and the wine visibly represent the absent body and blood of Christ, and are transubstantiated into the latter by the act of consecration. No visible change occurs, but the bread and the wine are taken to be present only in terms of their absence. They are bread and wine one body and blood, just as the text is present qua passion: Car le pain et le vin, une fois consacrés, sont ici maintenant, pain et vin sans l'étre: car le corps et le sang de Jesus absents sont cependant visiblement 1e pain et le vin sur l'autel.55 In the coming chapters the énoncé will be analysed in the narratives of four novels. Each will be considered as 96 a coherent semiotic structure in which versimilitude is simultaneously present and absent as a movement of differ- 2232 on both the material and the intentional planes, dimensions which in turn interact as presence and absence. Interpretation of the enunciative structure of novelistic semiosis will divulge a series of mosaics which represent successive phases of purgatorial man beset with the con- flictual yet comforting task of self-portrayal. John Lyons, Structural Semantics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), p. I} 2 Lyons, p. 5. 3 Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Dictionnaire encyclgpédigue des sciences du language (Paris: Seuil, 1972), p. 406. 4 Ducrot and Todorov, p. 410. 5 Ducrot and Todorov, p. 405. 6 . . . Jean Dub01s, "Enoncé et énonc1ation," Langages, 13 (1969), p. 102. 7 Dubois, p. 102. 3 Dubois, p. 102. 9 Zellig Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, IQSlY, p. 14. 10 Dominique Maingueneau, Initiation aux méthodes de l'analyse du discours (Paris: Hachettef‘1976TT pp. 99-100. 11 Pierre Ouellet, "La scene énonciative," Etudes littéraires, 10, no. 3 (1977), p. 450. 97 98 12 Maingueneau, p. 100. 13 Lewis Carroll, ”Through the Looking Glass" in Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray (c1897: rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 163. 14 Maingueneau, p. 6. 15 Maingueneau, p. 13. 16 Louis Guespin, Langages, 23 (1971), p. 10, quoted by Maingueneau, p. 11. 17 Michel Foucault, L'Archéologie du Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 128-9: 18 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970). 19 Barthes, Le degré zéro de l'écriture (1953: rpt. Paris: Seuil, 197?). p. 32. 20 Norman Holland, Poems in Persons (New York: W. w. Norton, 1973), p. 113. 21 Holland, p. 146. 22 Jean Ricardou, Pour une théorie du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 269. 23 Klaus Hempfer, Poststrukturale Texttheorie und Narrativ Praxis (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Veflag, I976), p. 52. 24 Lucien Dallenbach, Le Récit spéculaire (Paris: senil' 1977), pp. 127-80 99 25 Shlomith Rimmon, "A comprehensive theory of narra- tive" PTL I (New York: North Holland Publishing Company, 1976), p. 38. 26 Jean Piaget, Le Structuralisme (Paris: PUP, 1968), p. 5. 27 Piaget, p. 6. 28 Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (1974: rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), p. xiv. 29 Jean Starobinski, La Relation critique (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), p. 161. 30 Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock 1972), p. 316. 31 Charles W. Morris, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science Vol. 1, no. 2, (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1938), p. 30. 32 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976), p. 16. 33 Suzanne Cunningham, Language and the Phenomenolooi- cal Reductions of Edmund Husserl (The Hague: Martifius Nijfioff, 1976), pp. 84:5. 34 Cunningham, p. 85. 35 Cunningham, p. 85. 36 Edmund Husserl, Ideas (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969) y p. 108-9. 100 37 L. Gustafsson, 1969, quoted by Siegfried J. Schmidt, "A pragmatic interpretation of fictionality", in Pragmatics of Language and Literature, ed. Teun van Dijk (New York: North Holland Publishing—Company, 1973), p. 175. 38 Pragmatics of Language and Literature, Schmidt, p. 173. 39 Pragmatics of Lan uage and Literature, Teun van Dijk, "Pragmatics and Poetics", p. 35. 40 H. Grice, ”Logic and Conversation", quoted by Teun van Dijk, p. 46. 41 Francois Laruelle, "Le Texte quatrieme," L'Arc, 54 (1973), p. 41-3, my brackets. 42 Francoise van Rossum-Guyon, "Le Nouveau Roman comme critique du roman", in Nouveau Roman: Bier! au'ourd'hui, I, Problémes généraux (Paris: U.G.E., 10718, 1972), p. 218, my brackets. 43 Renato Barilli, ”Neutralisation et difference.” in Robbe-Grillet: Analyse, Théorie I, Roman/Cinema (Paris: UOGOBOI I I pp: ' 0 44 Jean Ricardou, pp. 211-33. 45 William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5, lines 26-8. 46 Jean Ricardou, pp. 33-8. 47 Jean Ricardou, NouveauxProblémes du roman (Paris: Seuil, 1978). 48 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "La synthese disjonctive", L'Arc 43 (1970), p. 57. 101 49 Deleuze and Guattari, p. 60. 50 Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel (Balti- more: Johns HOpkins Press, 1965), p. 296. 51 Samuel Beckett,Our Exa 'nation Round His Factifica- tion for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 21-2. 52 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues (1949: rpt. London: John Calder, 1965), p. 153. 53 E. M. Forster, Howards End (1910: rpt. London, Edward Arnold Ltd., 1973), p. 183. 54 Lao Tzu, The Way of Lao Tzu, trans. Wing-Tsit Chan (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1963), p. 119. 55 Louis Marin, La critique du discours (Paris, Minuit, 1975), p. 60. CHAPTER III A PURGATORIAL PARADOX THE anatomy of purgatory which informs Beckett's essay on Joyce, 'Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce",l strips the term of its strict Catholic meaning of a remission from damnation. The temporal expiation of guilt through suffering is more broadly readdressed as a structurally symmetrical confront- ation between two inimicalstates, heaven and hell. The ”flood of movement and vitality"2 occurring as they conjoin proves unexpectedly eschatological in his later fiction and drama: the reaction is entrOpic. Salvation and damnation are imprinted upon the idea of purgatory as an Augustine's Janus-faced thief. The first law of thermodynamics, con- servation, is conditioned by the second, entropy: just as the redemption of the first thif is complemented by the condemnation of the second. "Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do notpresume: one of the thieves was damned."3 Beckett states his interest as relating to the shape of Augustine's ideas. It is the shape he has already noted in the work of Joyce as creating the Optical illusion of paradox. The spherical appearance of Joycean purgatory leaves the outcome of conflict between virtue and vice 102 103 in doubt, for although "the vicious circle of humanity is being achieved,"4 it is by means of a bidirectional movement of flux. Inlike Dante's conical culminating purgatory, there is no apogee. Beckett's image does not so much convey a revolution which completes yet continues its circular track as it does the suggestion of a rotational confusion, rather like a wheel whichpturning at certain speeds, appears to reverse its movement. The intimation of a contradictory motion does not impede the wheel's forward progress: it does satisfy the mind's need to interpret a continuous momentum which defies measurement by the senses alone. A discontinuous progression in a different plane is auto- matically applied as a yardstick of the wheel's behaviour, upon reflection the evidence is rejected as inappropriate, but the illusion remains. The critical faculty must operate in a climate of dispassionateness if it is to manifest the impartiality requisite to abolish a self-deception. La Bataille de Pharsale finds a compelling leit-motiv in the fate of a Roman soldier condemned to purgatorial suffering. He must live with the feeling of his death in addition to under- going a particularly violent death: a sword thrust so powerful that it passes through his mouth to emerge at the nape of his neck: non pas la mort qui est le chatiment réservé a tous mais aprés ton destin 104 fatal 1e sentiment de ta mort i1 recut dans la bouche un si violent coup de. The intensity of pain so induced is hardly conducive to a detached attitude, containing as it does a principle of self-prolongation. Yet if art can and is to remain aloof from such all-embracing sentiment, it behooves the artist to adopt the quality of iconoclasm: 1e massacre aussi bien gue l'amour est un prétexte a glorifier la forme dont 1a splendeur calme apparait seulement a ceux qui ont pénétré l'indif‘érence de la nature devant 1e massacre et l'amour. (BP; p. 119) The novel is a testing ground for the criterion of indifferentism. It has become fashionable to separate the prefix 252 from the word text by a hyphen: pre-text, in Simonian criticism, liberating the text prOper from the feelings which precede its composition. The alleviation from suffering so obtained proceeds from a penetration of love and death as masks cloaking nature's impassivity, or conversely from a desire to see in form the false measure of human emotions properly irreducible to analytical me- thods. The first contingency offers actual relief, the second an illusion of salvation. La Bataille de Pharsale sets the two at loggerheads. John Sturrock has distinguished the work of Claude Simon from the absurdist tradition by remarking a dis- passionate tolerance of necessity in Simon's attitude in contrast to the polemical endurance of deprivation: 105 The moral equivalent therefore of Simon's prescribed acceptance of flux is indifferentism. (...) He is trying to establish a fundamental truth and, like Robbe-Grillet, he criticizes the phi1050phers of the absurd for erecting the absurd itself into an idol, and for positing a non-existent ideal order of things against which reality can be measured and found wanting. Sturrock begins his chapter with a reference to the manliness of Simon's novels and communicates the notion of a vigorous indifferentism on the part of the novelist, one achieved as much by prescription as by acceptance. The inertia of the latter's response is prompted by a teleolo- gical drive, a doctrinaire abstention from moralistic con- cerns. Sturrock's commentary, when applied to the work of the novelist itself, indicates a tension in the achievement of indifference not altogether dissimilar from the structure of repression in the absurdist imagery of Beckett. Patterns of convergence and divergence around a missing core or ful- crum recur as representations of liberation through purpose- ful confinement. La Derniére Bande is remarkable in that one of the interlocutors is a tape-recorder, staging itself as the instrument of desire and reflecting the impulse of Krapp in the expanding and contracting rotation of its spools. The tapes themselves have no centre, they are restricted to the precise mechanical motion of the machine with its ex- truding knobs and switches, in order to free their secret. The role played by the machine in deciphering meaning 106 is taken for granted by the audience, and unlike so many of the contraptions in Beckett's failing universe, the tape- recorder is surprisingly reliable. The narrator of La Bataille de Pharsale takes issue with the automatic assumption of the decoding operation as a given and dramatises the failure of any a priori system to explicate the truth of secrecy. Meaning is not to be de- canted from a sealed blue print but inhabits the parenthesis of art. It is approachable as a contradictory series of formal gestures poised in balletic counterpoint and irre- ducible to any unilateral scheme of rationalisation. The narrator attempts to anatomise the substance of the novel's composition at "0". As the figurative core of the novel this section explains the coordination of the narra- tor's field of vision and the consequent appearance of his perceived world. "0” is the literary equivalent of the tape-recorder. A cybernetic comparison of the two reveals the human limitations of the narrator in encoding and decod- ing a message. The passage may be defined as a meta-textual interpretive act which falls considerably short of exhaus- tive explication. The attempt to supply a methodological tool gains a partly disfunctional instrument. Like the novel itself, symbolised in the presence of the decaying Proustian intertexts and combine harvester, the critical apparatus is shown in the act of shrinking towards the vanishing point from whence it emerged. "O" is a 107 digressive analysis which attempts to deal with hopeless complexity. Unlike Alice's cat it is fated to achieve a self-cancelling expression despite no lack of substance. The opening line, "Repartir, reprendre a zéro,” becomes the refrain which aborts an interpretive gesture uncertain- 1y facing a plethora of conical perceptual domains and or- ders. The geometric enterprise resigns itself progressively to inadequacy, becoming content with an impressionistic ren- dition of the whole as a series of expansions and contrac- tions around fixed points. The sole guiding principle is the Protean unpredictability of continuous self-deformation. Et si l'on tient egalement compte gue dans l'exposé ci-dessus on a simplifié 1a figure en choisissant une seule coupe pratiquée selon un plan vertical et dans un moment donné (et que l'on pourrait concevoir guantité d'autres schémas, d'autres coupes, soit dans l'espace (horizontale ou obliques), soit encore dans le temps), on doit se figurer l'ensemble du systéme comme un mobile se déformant autour de quelques rares points fixes. (BP; p. 181) The passage ”0” at this point loses its explicative concision in polysemic confusion and discards any resem- blance to its title: the writing becomes a reflection of the novel's self-deforming pattern. Throughout the passage the term ”0" itself has migrated between characters as an iden- tifying label, between geometrical figures as a spatial coordinate and between narratorial observation points in the further realms of time and of the atemporal or oneiric dimension. As the mise-en-abymewof its creator's thwarted 108 desire for a geometrically pure form "0"'s very composition now assumes a defensive posture. It is prismatically dis- torted to double as a mobile, deflecting the strictures imposed by the self-analytical gesture. The image of the mobile springs from the conceptual convolutions which pre- cede it, and is reflected in the complexity of the syntax. The description, by virtue of its intended clarity, attains an impossibly vague condition, one opposite to the function of the tape-recorder. The logic of "0"'s proposition is hypothetical, whereas that of the tape-recorder is categor- ical. Although defective by the standards required of the latter instrument, "0" is a highly effective and purposive tract, one which refines the notion of indifferentism by subjecting form to the rigour of an unexpected looic. Krapp must process his memories sequentially through a machine which guarantees them as unassailably discrete from their fellows by reason of their location upon the Spool. No such inviolability inheres in the composition of La Bataille de Pharsale, where the rare fixed points are, as Simon else- where concurs, no more than intersections (BP: p. 186). They impart a multidirectional complexity to the events recorded by conferring a principle of simultaneity upon the decoding process. The collision of two temporal orders, synchronic and diachronic, permits the conjunction of two manners of interpretation. A reading of nature's subordi- nation to human drama, evidenced when following the 109 syntagmatic ribbon of chronological order, is subjected to a compositional harmonisation at the points of intersection. The overlapping of sequences is paradigmatic of a departure from the endless cycle of love and death. Here the work of art seeks an atemporal symmetry framed by the exigencies of linguistic interplay and guided by human intervention. The solace to be derived from the narrative construction of La Bataille de Pharsale is, ironically, both real and imagi- nary for the artist as he departs from linear time, for the act of giving abstract form to his suffering is guided by a fresh evocation of feeling, now relived beyond the moment of its death. The admixture of illusion and realitv characterising the narrator's strategy for reviewing his past is made explicit as paradox from the novel's inception. The inter- penetration of form and feeling is revealed in its full com- plexity in an introductory reference to Zeno. Paradox is to be understood as an apparent and a flat contradiction in terms in the above acceptation, it reveals and defers mean- ing. The two terms, form and feeling, are each revealed as containing a principle of the other, thereby deferring the ascendancy of one over the other. It is the truth of para- dox which is enlisted to administer to love and death as to indifferentism the physic which will render them their true colours. Feeling ceases to be a mere facade for form and vice versa as they are conjoined into the divided self of 110 paradox. Encapsulated in an excerpt from Valéry's Cimetiére gagig the celebrated paradoxes from Zeno, those of the arrow's flight and Achilles and the tortoise are cited as epigraphic principles for the first panel of the novel's triptychousstructure. A philosopher of the Eleatic school and a disciple of Parmenides, Zeno sought to illustrate the latter's doctrine of the incompatibility of continuity with discontinuity. An infinitely divisible whole cannot reasonably be measured as a finite total by calculating the sum of its innumerable parts. Zeno translates the notion of impossible addition into a rejection of the concept of motion through time and Space. The fate of Achilles is never to succeed in overtaking the tortoise, the indefinite reduction of the fractional distance separating the two competitors is an asymptotic and in the final analysis tele- ophobic reckoning. The arrow's flight carries to a reasoned conclusion the refutation of movement along a continuum. The arrow,at any given moment motionless in flight, cannot strike its target since it must traverse an infinite number of points in order to travel a finite distance. Zeno's demonstrations are concluded in the language of paradox in that they must initially bow to the self-evidence offered to the senses, namely that Achilles does win, just as the arrow does arrive at its destination. Only then can the obvious be contested and reduced to a perfunctory category 111 of appearances. The harmonious co-presence of two irre- ducible orders of intelligibility, continuity and discon- tinuity, purveys language as a bracketing or principle of deferral. The ineluctable trajectory of the arrow is tem- porally dislocated by the logic of Zeno's argument. In Valéry's poem the cycle of human experience occu- pies the parenthesis of its representation. Birth and ex- tinction inhabit the perfidious assonance of conflict, and in their turn determine the genesis and exodus of the lat- ter: Zénon! Cruel Zénon! Zénon d'Elée! M'as-tu percé de cette fléche ailée Oui vibre, vole, et qui ne vole pas! Le son m'enfante et la fléche me tue! (BP: p. 7) The first person form is both a reference to the human subject, the poem's enunciative voice,and to its linguistic body the pronoun shifter, in this case also a synecdochic Doppelganger for the work itself. The poem's divided self is born of the vibrating messenger of death, itself a reso- nant harbinger of the poem's demise. As a celebration of birth the pleasant symmetry of language assumes the death- dealing guise of the arrow. Yet the arrow does not seem to fly, which permits the poem's single astonished moment, a dglgi suggested by the tautoloqical expansion "Zénon d'Elee“, to bear lyrical witness to the unexpected and mor- bid vitality of the arrow stationary in flight. Even as the poem creates its own parenthetical space, it accommodates and mirrors the fate of the speaker. 112 The ensuing portrait of Achilles crystallises as a pictorial oxymoron the rapid progress of a stationary solar figure across the heavens. The poem is now fully ensconced within the third person hiatus of its paradox where events are experienced not as action but as shadowed images: Ah! le soleil... Quelle ombre de tortue Pour l'fime. Achille immobile a grands pas! (BP: 9. 7) The first paradox furnished by Valéry valorises each extreme of the poetic gesture in terms of its complement. The poem's linguistic Shape cannot come to life without being implicated in the experience of mortality, the arrow is fecund only in its lethal consequence. Conversely the poem's imprisoned human subject, the narrative voice, cannot participate by direct intervention, it is free only to regard the death-like stylisation of its own statement mirrored in the arrested time of the image. An insistence upon the necessary complementarity of art and life reveals the artist's dilemma. The pleonastic recourse to a second paradox, that of Achilles and the tor- toise depicts the poem's measured gait as a shadow upon the soul. Zeno's arrow, like language occupies the domain of discontinuous structures; the vital elan of the poet's being is checked and held in the plodding grasp of the lin- guistic fragment. Even as the poet achieves Achillean immortality his progress is halted, his substance linguist- ically restructured. Symbolically the tortoise suggests 113 the mortality of the soul; it is the animal capable not only of retracting its limbs but by its imperceptible motion of simulating the stasis of inanimation, presenting a dark side of the sun. Seen as the instrument of Thanatos, the arrow,like the tortoise, brings about death by immobilisa- tion. The logic of the arrow's flight has fatal consequen- ces for the very notion of flight. As with Beckett's marriage of heaven and hell, however, the shape of the ideas engenders vitality. The artist's paradoxes are a demonstration of the absence of vital signs, yet, like Cupid's arrow, they are lodged in a fertile mould of con- flictual proportion, generating the coupling of their parts. The quotation from Valéry is unlike the extracts from Proust and Heidegger which serve to introduce the second and third portions of the novel respectively in that the exper- ience of paradox is directly purgatorial. The suffering induced by the poetic experience accompanies and threatens to engulf the statement as the exclamation "Ah! le soleil.." produces a hiatus in the series of exclamations. The refrain "Je souffrais comme..." (BP: p. 59) per- forms a Similar function non nova sed nove in the first panel of La Bataille de Pharsale, when the shape of inter- secting images introduced by the narrator momentarily over- whelm him. The phrase finds its contradiction in the inter- ruptory assertion ”je ne souffrais pas" (BP: p. 73). Nega- tion of the theme of suffering is likewise phonetically 114 paralleled by a second refrain "je ne savais pas" (BP; p. 81) which returns to the narrator's painful astonishment at the horror of death. The implication is that he now knows what he did not before, but it is in turn countered by a return to the present tense, "je ne sais pas" (BF; p. 81). The experience is further associated by the adverb "comme" to the presence of jealousy. "Disant que la jalousie est comme..." (BP; p. 20) Jealousy is structurally defined by the text as occu- pying a tOpographical location: "jalousie ou donc page do droite en haut" (BP; p. 90). The newspaper being read by the narrator defines the topology of the page in terms of the view partially obscured by the upper right hand corner of the page: Journal peut-étre pour se dissimuler ou justifier déployé 1e bord supérieur des feuilles dessinant un angle obtus largement ouvert au ras duquel il peut voir la fenétre et juste sur le c6té de la page droite la porche de l'immeuble. (BP: p. 64) The term "jalousie", perhaps in deference to the novel by Robbe-Grillet bearing that title, is to be read as a play on words. Jealousy is associated to the shut- tered window behind which sits the narrator's uncle, himself the victim of a jealous passion, while the branches of the pomegranate play their shadows over the screened surface: leur ombre jouant sur ces volets toujours obstinément clos et lui derriére dans cette odeur Sfire de mofit d'alcool de 115 choses en decomposition comme un cadavre jalousie page de droite vers le haut. (BP; p. 38) Jealousy, etymologically related to zeal, is revealed as a blind passion feeding upon suspicion in an obsessional pat- tern of circular behaviour. It is fuelled by the obstacle that it itself constitutes to the direction of its own vision. Its two aspects, desire and blindness are manifest in the play on words which differentiates the will to know from the impenetrability of knowledge. The diSplacement of desire back toward the self is morbid, even cadaverous, for it is itself an entombed passion. The newSpaper too func- tions as a blind; by an accident of its unfolding the news- paper appears as jealousy itself to the narrator, an identi- fication so unexpected as to remain unsuspected to others. Less accurately, the narrator appears to be reading the newspaper while he is, in fact, surveying the windows of the building opposite where he believes an infidelity is taking place. Prevented by his mask from revealing his true acti- vity and feelings, he is condemned to ostracism in self- defeating torment. Desire is thwarted at every turn, sty- listically by negation and truncated simile, physically by the printed page and the inaccessible hotel room, to which the modes of entry, visual and physical, are perceived as hostile obstacles. Upon entering the hotel the narrator will suffer injury, breaking a bone in his hand as he strikes at the unyielding surface of the bedroom door. 116 The solipsism of the narrator's affective environment is frequently taken to more than mirror an onomastic pro- pensity in language. The Roussellian thesis holds that human drama is but a pretext for the random spontaneity of word play. It has been adOpted by the Cerisy line of criti- cism on Claude Simon's work. The intrusion of psychological determinism of the sort which makes of La Bataille de Phar- sale a novel about jealousy is to be carefully avoided by critic and novelist alike according to sudha tenet.?Language becomes the locus of a schiZOphrenic disjunction from real- ity, its behaviour synthetized by a self-sufficient inter- play of signs. The above-mentioned position offers the temptation of attributing deterministic powers to the Sign itself in arbitrary fashion. It also deprives language of a dimension immanent to its utterance, that of the indwell— ing author. Human experience is reduced to a concatenation of signifiers and signifieds, the two-dimensional by— product of the use of language. Jean Ricardou's work often privileges certain novelis- tic signs for no apparent reason. Ricardou submits that yellow is one of the signifiers which determines the nature of La Bataille de Pharsale: ”1e jaune est l'une des exi- gences a laquelle doit se soumettre La Bataille de Phar- "7 Yellow is, as Ricardou suggests, freguently asso- sale. ciated with black in the novel and does play an extensive symbolic role relative to the pigeon and its connotation of 117 war. No less so does the Opposition between red and green, entirely neglected by Ricardou, which serves as a leit- motiv throughout Simon's novels including La Bataille de Pharsale,linking in war-like struggle the signs of Bros and Thanatos. To interpret the novel's title as "La Bataille de la phrase”, the heading of Ricardou's essay, is to create a precedent for unbridled ludicity. Randi Birn noted the possibility that Simon is playing a "farce sale"8 on the reader. Discovery of the bottle of aperitif, "SAINT RAPHAEL” in the text of the novel may well yet lead to Speculation about the anagram La Bataille de S Raphael with overtones of embattled painters and archangels. The parsimonious guarantee of synthesis offered by language 333 arbitrariness is Simply the ongoing interpretive prospect of polysemic contradiction, a principle recognised but not ob- served by Ricardou. The play on the word ”jalousie" indicates linguisti- cally the structuration of a behaviour to which the narra- tor is subject. Language is not ludicity but lucidity. The narrator is enmeshed in an automatic pattern of conduct. Not so the words he uses, which confer the principle of self-awareness, the quality of the literariness and the realm of the indwelling author upon the text. The passion which compels the narrator is not directly susceptible of perception. It is for this reason inaccurate to speak of the narrator's actions as a deliberate mask. 118 What he appears to be doing, reading the newspaper, and what he is actually doing, studying the window opposite, are for him merged into one confused activity. Language, here the medium for self-portrayal, is the repository of a self-consciousness irretrievable by the narrator. He is unable to decode the depiction of his own anguish. In the first part of the novel conjecture runs rife when the open- ing pages are subsequently discussed in interior monologue: peut-étre parce que le pigeon s'est trouve dans cette phase du vol juste au moment on il s'est interposé entre le soleil et l'oeil. (BP: 13. 41) By resorting to the act of critical commentary the narrator interposes a further hindrance to direct express- ion. He attempts to recuperate verbal flux by a reductive nominalism, as if naming the pigeon will serve as a palli- ative and a clue to aid him in the disentanglement of a fevered jumble of impressions. J.A.E. Loubere expands a comment by Deguy on Le Palace in the direction of the life- lessness which awaits the protagonist, by whom she means the narrator. He suffers from an inability to articulate his own human drama which subtends his description: A profusion of objects recorded, the rapid succession of views provides a preliminary sense of constant motion, but, as Michel Deguy in his essay on The Palace (1962) observes, description in the shape of inventory is like "a desperate attempt to graSp at what is taking flight." In flight the long parade of objects appears strangely hieratic, repeti- tive, mechanical, hallucinatory, and the novel's protagonist struggles in vain to reanimate a 119 sequence of flat images and restore density to the outlines of vanished forms. The narrator attempts to comprehend a delirious flight of images by assuming the deductive role of the analyst. The orderly world of commentary shows itself to be ill-adapted to the text. His attempts at interpretation are consistent- ly denotative and wooden, lacking the flexibility of imagin- ative association requisite to plumb the wealth of connota- tive resources in his writing. The narrator is fated to experience his writing as a self-deforming mobile and to respond to it as such. Loubére speaks of Simon's attempt to capture sense impressions within their temporal and circumstantial context as a painterly project: Yet, whatever the means of capture, (by a rise de vue) there is a pause, a hiatus between the world af—moving images and the act that registers them. This hiatus is the area that Simon (who was once a painter) persistently explores.’10 Simon considers himself to be a peintre raté: David Carroll considers Simon's novels akin to non-representational art.11 The narrator as critic conceals his failure to understand his writing by seeing it in a non-representational aspect. He promulgates his partial insight by attempting to write the final section of the novel as an anti-representational piece and further estranges himself from the self-reflective quality of his writing within a self-deception of planome- tric psychology. Writing, like desire, is enfolded within a structural 120 complication. The novelist is screened from the object of his attention and interprets the object as the screen, ”jalousie" instead of love, non-representation instead of representation. Randi Birn describes Simon's artistic pro- ject in an article, "Proust, Claude Simon and the Art of the Novel,” without acknowledging the presence of an inversion of the object of and obstacle to writing. The first part of the work is viewed as a failure on the part of the narrator to write a Proustian novel: In part 1 Simon describes the futile attempt of the protagonist to obtain a harmonious vision of the world through restoration of images taken from a personal and historical past. The protagonist's failure parallels that of the narrator to write a novel based on the Proustian quest model.1 Birn interprets the appearance of the word Marcel written in pencil on a wall as the presence of Proust. The depredation of imitators has defaced the work of this literary predecessor. In the passage to which Birn refers, the word Marcel is already out of place; as a label it is curiously pristine. Its appearance, unlike the rest of the wall, does not betray an attempt at ruination. It seems to be a nominalist post-script which fantasizes con- trol of the rest of the wall, the fresh wound which assimi- lates the memory of all scars: La peinture des murs était éraflée et rayée, comme couverte de cicatrices, quelquefois involontaires (...), d'autres fois volontaires, guoigue sans motivations précises, a part un nom (Marcel) griffonné 121 an crayon, les mains gui avaient laissé 1a leurs traces paraissant le plus souvent s'étre attachées a perfectionner les dépradations antérieures, comme, par exemple, agrandir un trou ou creuser avec soin des croisillons. (BP; p. 21) Birn follows closely the reading invited by the narra- tor as critic, in which his failure to comprehend his writ- ing becomes an attempt to break down the order of the trad- itional novel. Birn does not perceive her reading as per- taining only to the fantasy life of the narrator anxious to subordinate his creation to the confines of his own under- standing: In part one of La Bataille de Pharsale the protagonist's afidithe narrator‘s attempts to create artistic wholeness through recovery of an historical and personal past are doomed to become unintegrated juxtapositions of images. Birn surmises that the narrator will only be able to create new designs when the name Marcel has been effaced. The evi— dence of the first part of the novel does not contest this point of view. The narrator is hemmed about by the inade- quacy of his response. The first panel of the triptych ends in an inability to describe the latest object of his gaze. He is left ensconced in a twilight world, his curiosity ex- hausted as his line of vision is progressively emptied of noteworthy images: ”Le couple ne présente rien de particu- lier" (BP; p. 98). At face value the end of the first phase of the triptych does obliterate the name of Marcel in a svm- bolic way, the new order of the second panel seems to dawn in a light of salvation. Ironically, Proust reappears as 122 the presiding epigraphic figure, holding forth hope that the immaterial presence, thought, may subtend the relation of the image to concrete reality: 11 y avait peut-étre sous ces signes quelque chose de tout autre que je devais tacher de découvrir, une pensée gu'ils traduisaient a la facon de ces caracteres hiéroglyphigues qu'on croirait représenter seulement des objets matériels. (BP: p. 99) The implicit incongruity of an emergent Proustian order justifies close examination of the narrator's preten- sions. In order for the novel to retain its characteristic of paradox, the narrator must conceal his alienation from his own literary endeavour within a false sense of achieve- ment. A counterpoint is to be maintained between the real relief that writing brings and the illusion of relief that apparent mastery of the writing process accords. The narrator displays a determination to use the con- tradictory structure of paradox itself as a manner of trans- cending his condition. He renders the task of discrimina- tion between his possible roles extremely delicate and crit- cial to a reading of the novel as intrinsically paradoxical. If he succeeds in reorganizing his environment as no more than a flat contradiction in terms than he will have de- signed purgatory as a form of liberation. It will expel him from a self-cancelling bondage at the completion of its cycle. The mid-section of La Bataille de Pharsale prepares the 123 strategy of structural inversion. A cartoon in the news- paper attracts the narrator's attention by virtue of its triptyclpus composition. It provides a "mise en abyme" of the narrator's project: the inversion of rotational di- rection upon reaching the final panel: Les trois images c6te a c6te danS leur ordre de lecture (c'est a dire de gauche a droite (...) composant, peut-étre a l'insu du dessinateur, une sorte de triptyque ou l'on passerait de la premiere image a la troisiéme par une rotation (un rabattement) d'un demi-cercle, 1e centre étant exactement occupé par la bouche sanglante de la femme dont la vision est immédiatement encadrée a droite et a gauche par l'appareil mural dont la place du premier au troisiéme dessins s'est trouvée inverse, comme Si l'image intermédiaire, (l'Eve perfide) se trouvait en somme a l'intérieur de l'appareil, comme si la voix n'était pas celle d'un étre de chair mais celle-la méme de la boite metallique accrochée au mur. (BP: pp. 69-70) The Optical illusion of contradictory movement is in evidence in the reversal of the order Of reading which appears normal only at first, "c'est a dire de gauche a droite." The image Of bidirectional movement reflects the balance of the whole novel, which reverses movement at its midpoint to achieve complete reification of the narrative's vitality. The term of comparison "comme" is Speculative, announcing the fiction of an automation to replace the flesh and blood of the perfidious Eve. The final panel of the novel will embody this principle in what might be described as a reversal Of the powers Of Pygmalion: the moment of in- fidelity is artistically resculpted as stone: 124 O dit Chut! et S'immobilise. Les deux corps restent ainsi, comme changes en pierre. (BP; p. 216) The repression of a chaotic welter Of movement announces the emergence of art as a calm sublimation of love and death. The canvas transforms the subject - jealousy - into a transcendent harmony of colour: L'harmonie générale du tableau repose sur l'accord des verts sombres et du rose chaud, légérement grisé, des corps nus. Au dos de la carte postale, dans la partie réservée a la correspondance en haut, le titre du tableau, apres le nom du peintre en majuscules (LUCAS CRANACH d. A) est répété en trois langues: Die Fifersucht - Envy - La Jalousie." (BP: p. 228) The intimation Of statuesque death lies in the faint sug— gestion of grey, a subtle deterioration of colour which accompanies the interplay Of red and green. The growing repression of flesh tones has two distinct facets in its composition. It is a manifestation of the lifelessness which awaits the narrator, as J.A.E. Loubere suggeSts. It also provides the optical illusion of regression, Of "rabattement", which will endow the narrator with a world Of sanctuary from the baneful vitality of the images which have sapped the vigour of his own response. In the second case the narrator suborns his critical powers tO a false interpretation of his environment, imparting an illusionary appearance of immortality to the ineluctable process of decay. David Carroll reflects the narrator's strategy quite 125 succinctly in his comments on an engraving of Barcelona in the novel Histoire, the one immediately preceding La Bataille de Pharsale. Carroll analyses the nature of re- pression in both perception and history. Order is achieved by an elimination of conflict. Sensory impressions are re- cognised and political systems imposed by an elimination of their perpetual or historical context, which is at odds with the will to order. For a single structure to stand forth from its background, the competing elements must be repressed. Such an event is inherently contradictory. "The impossibility of maintaining such an order is evident in the act of repression itself."14 In order to countermand re- pression in history or in perceptual space, the direction of the repression, synchronic for the sense of sight, diachron— ic for the case of history, must be reversed: History must be read synchronically in order to undermine its assumed linearity, and Space must be read diachronically in order tO undermine its apparently closed nature. The engraving of Barcelona depicts struggle itself. It is Open in its frame of reference, permitting successive generations of readers to view the course of history as conflict. The text of the engraving manages to thwart re- pression by depicting the formlessness Of anarchy. The Spanish Civil War of the twentieth century can be read into the representation Of nineteenth century Barcelona, time has no linear value with which to create an orderly per- Spective on history. 126 The narrator of La Bataille de Pharsale bears witness to the Steady repression of conflictual Space in his writing but does so in such a way as tO make it appear that he is in fact in control, attaining disorder Of a non-representa- tional category. He can profit from the confusion in terms to promote his ascendancy over time. The second panel of the triptych paves the way for the narrator's penetration into the timeless dimension of an art seemingly free from the baleful auspices Of Zeno's arrow. The steady attrition of the white noise Of impressions continues from the vertiginous kaleidoscOpe Of the opening pages into "Bataille", the Opening sequence Of the second section. By a subornation of the logic of his perception the narrator will present silence as tumult, the inaudibility of undif- ferentiated clamour: presque tous ont la bouche ouverte sans doute crient-ils aussi les uns de douleur les autres pour s'exciter au combat 1e tumulte est a ce point on l'on n'entend plus rien. (BP; p. 122) The sequence entitled "Bataille" is faithful to the precept which figures in the introductory quotation from Proust. It attempts to plumb the resources of a particular image as a hieroglyph in order to fathom the ideas invested paradigmatically in material forms. The passage opens blithely upon a neutral topic, the weather, "11 fait beau" (BP: p. 101) morning has emerged from night, cleansed "comme (...) quand il a plu 1a veille” (BP: p. 101) 127 bringing with it no signs Of impending overcast skies, "avant que la chaleur ne l'embrume ou 1e plombe" (BP: p. 101). The experience Of the previous day, the preceding panel Of the text, has apparently purged the image tO its most pleasant neutrality, "1e ciel est d'un bleu léger, lavé" (BP: p. 101). The way is prepared for the second face of purgatory, the first phase of Augustine's parataxis, in the form of a revitalising vertigo which will be more fully developed in the final section of the second panel. "O",aS a mobile, a model for the flow of narratorial consciousness: "1e ciel semble pivoter imperceptiblement autour d'un point fixe, Situé a l'infini" (BP: p. 102). The contradiction is achieved as a circle in which noise inten- sifies to nothingness. The following sections dwell upon images of death, imbricating the subject Of the work, Caesar's victory at Pharsalus, into the effluvium Of past memories redolent of decay and of Oblivion. The narrator's attempts to come to terms with his past have undergone a change in nature. He no longer seeks to locate the past in the tOpography of the real world. The plains of Pharsalia are inscrutable, hold- ing none of the funereal aspect Of Caesar as the narrator remembers him from childhood. The trip south from Farsala bears little resemblance to schoolboy associations of Caesar and death: de ce pondérable et sévére personnage qui 128 contemplait 1e champ de bataillle de Pharsale de ses yeux aux prunelles creusées dans le bronze, froid, ambitieux et concis, coulé dans ce métal dont la couleur funebre évoquait en meme temps pour moi l'odeur caractéristique de la peinture dont on enduit dans les colleges les pupitres des écoliers. (8?: p. 127) The narrator now seeks accommodation of his quest for a meaningful reintegration Of the past into the present in the realm of representation. In the section entitled ”Voyage", the narrator pauses before the representation of blind Orion by Poussin. The giant is walking towards the rising sun's light. Poussin's concept of hollow space en- globes the Spectator, "entourant de toutes parts 1e spec- tateur meme" (BP: p. 160), unlike the work of della Fran- cesca or Ucello: the narrator is compelled to use the English term "movement into space" (BP: p. 160) to communi- cate the complexity of this response. Orion is disappear- ing, yet remains present and gigantic,thus avoiding the fate of the vanished Guerrier, "s'enfoncant 1e spectateur s'enfoncant en méme temps gigantesque" (BP: p. 160). It is his very size which is symbolic of present hope. His head, rising above the trees, is bathed in the first rosy light of dawn while the countryside remains in darkness. In Orion the narrator has found an Optimistic environment for the purgatorial experience of Achilles running without motion: "non plus spectacle (...) mais pour ainsi dire environne- ment l'eSpace parcouru immobile a grand (sic) pas" 129 (BP; p. 163). The narrator becomes increasingly interested in an Open-ended representation framed only by the specta- tor's assimilation to it. In this respect he resembles the narrator of Histoire. The engraving of Barcelona in Histoire as discussed by David Carroll is Open to history, it incorporates in its frame the possibility for interpre- tations conditioned by past and future events. The history of Spain can be read within the engraving of Barcelona precisely because its frame is not absolute and thus the space it constitutes is open to history, to the history (the traces of the past and future) alreigy inscribed and to be inscribed within it. The narrator of La Bataille de Pharsale is faithful to a tradition Of Simonian narrators in refusing a closed system of interpretation to his work. He implicitly echoes the decision Of the novelist not to have reprinted his earliest work, an autobiography, La Corde raide. Memory proves an unreliable guide for the autobiographer and its unreliability contains none Of the consolation that it does for Proust's Marcel. Albertine disparue contains the re- assurance that the failure Of memory guarantees its non- interference in present reality: Le Temps retrouvé Offers the corresponding panacea that the associative power of in- voluntary memory affirms the historical integrity Of the personality. For Simon it is the fragmentation and the attendant confusion of memory which undermines its function as impartial recorder of events. Alastair Duncan, in a 130 brief communication, "A propos de la corde raide" notes that the jumbled fragments which constitute Simon's past are Proustian in appearance, but permit no organic synthe- sis, "Synthése organique",17 unlike the final pages of Le Temps retrouvé. The narrator of La Bataille de Pharsale experiences nevertheless a nostalgia for a completeness or autonomy of form. In the closed economy of an autarchic environ- ment, that of calm splendour, ”1e splendeur calme" the past can be recycled independently of the feeling Of death which has devolved from the surrogate Crastinus upon the narrator. He has been implicated in the fate of Crastinus, for his vicarious attachment to the centurion has fused with the memories Of his past sufferings and is a symbol for their continuing presence. The final unit Of the novel's second section presents a system Of intelligibility for the novel. The narrator's position is a prevarication; the image Of a self-deforming mobile lends interpretive shape to a pro- cess of misshaping. The narrator will seek form beyond the province of suffering within the domain of a shape-shifting indifferentism. ”0" the figurative mid-point of the novel has in fact undergone a lateral displacement to the end of the second panel of the novel's triptych. The deformation herein entailed motivates the novel towards its final transition. The last panel of La Bataille de Pharsale is based upon a principle of malfunction. 131 Prefaced by an explanatory citation from Heidegger, the final panel of the triptych embodies the former's assertion that damage appearing in a tool ensures the visibility of the whole of the purpose for which the tool is designed. The world thus announced is not something never seen before: it has always been present but taken for granted: Un outil apparait endommagé, des matériaux apparaissent inadéquats ... C'est dans ce découvrement de l'inutilisable gue soudain l'outil s'impose a l'attention... Le systéme de renvois ou s'insérent les outils ne s'éclaire pas comme un quelque chose qui n'aurait jamais été vu, mais comme un tout qui, d'avance et toujours, s'offrait au regard. Or, avec ce tout, c'est le monde qui s'annonce. (BP; p. 187) It is perhaps unreasonable to assume that the reader Of Simon's novels will possess a fresh and clear understand- ing Of the passages in Being and Time to which he is re- ferred. Accordingly a synopsis and appreciation of the passage is appropriate. Heidegger borrows the Greek accept- ation Of a Thing as being a piece of equipment, a tool "that which one has tO do with in one's concernful dealings."18 He then discusses the ontological nature of the tool as be— ing pragmatic in character. He redefines the tool as "some- thing in order to....." (BT; p. 97). Heidegger avoids in this way the ontOlOgical stumbling block Of the Thing itself in order to focus upon what is to be done with it as a tool. Equipment is discovered in its quality of purpose or readi- ness-to-hand before it can be apprehended as neutral or 132 present-at-hand. Heidegger turns from the moot point as to whether one quality is in fact founded ontologically upon the other, to focus upon an understanding of the world in relation to the entities which it contains. He hypothe- sises that equipment, "entities within the world" (BT: p. 101) accedes indirectly to worldhood by virtue of its de- pendence upon the world. The Dasein of equipment is deter- mined by the relation Of the tool to the world. Dasein is "optically constituted by Being-in-the World" (BT: p. 102). Dasein possesses moreover an understanding Of its own Being, and thereby to some degree understands the world to which its Being is associated. The world is thus illum- inated "lit up" (BT; p. 102) by Dasein's concernful deal- ings, its understanding of itself as equipment. The purpose of equipment is'however,discoverable ontologically only when it is not taken for granted. The tool must malfunction and create a rift between itself and the context Of its use. By viewing the tool's intended function, not the properties of the tool itself, one may indirectly discover it. Equipment becomes conspicuous as a consequence Of the discovery Of its unusability: "We discover its unusability, however, not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by the circumspection Of the dealings in which we use it. When its unusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes con- spicuous" (BT; p. 102). It is the dialogue between equip- ment and the context for which it is intended which 133 illuminates the latter as a totality. The illumination of the tool's context forms a horizon of possibility which announces the world. It will have been noted in the foregoing summary of the thought contained in Simon's quotation that Dasein arrogates to itself the reSponsibility for understanding its prOper purpose, the quality of readiness-to-hand. The tool under- stands itself in so far as there is a referral, a pointing away from itself "Verweisung" (BT: p. 97) towards its func- tion. In this regard an analogy may be drawn with what Heidegger terms apophantic discourse. The prefix apo means away, and -phantic letting something be seen. "Discursive communication, in what it says (in ihrem Gesaqten), makes manifest what it is talking about, and thus makes it access- ible to the other party" (BT: p. 56). Heidegger specifical- ly refers to discourse which lets something be seen by pointing it out. The novel correSponds well enough to this description, according to Roland Barthes it points out its own mask, larvatusyprodeo. The quotation from Heidegger in La Bataille de Pharsale is apophantic in a paradoxical way, for it does not only point out what it seems to be pointing out, it is in itself a damaged piece of equipment in its present context, and so unexpectedly announces the world of the novel when viewed from the aSpect of its damage. The quotation is supposed to be taken as ready-at-hand, to mirror the situation Of the epigraphic citations which 134 preface the first two parts of the novel. Upon closer inspection it does not resemble its predecessors, for it is fragmented, several pages of Being and Time are omitted between the opening and closing statements. The omission may be better understood in the context of a comparison of Heideggerian Dasein to the painterly movement into space. In his work Phenomenology and Literature Robert Magliola explores the relationship Of Hart Crane's poem "Legend" to authentic Dasein. His description Of Crane's bridge bears a striking resemblance to the presence of blind Orion in Poussin's paintings: Foregrounded against the sun, a symbol of temporality, the Bridge strides from past to future. Yet freedom stays the experience SO the bridge rests in a poised present. These passages from Crane illustrate Dasein's authentic experience of time. Freedom is to be understood as a form of access to the authentic present from the ecstatic states of past and future. Magliola illustrates this point with a quote from Binswanger on the "thrownness" or "being-in-advance of itself of the Dasein."20 It is a concept consonant in the shape of its ideas with Beckett's understanding of purgatory as a conjunction Of two transcendent and repressive states. Heidegger in the above interpretation is seen to be little concerned with the paradoxical aspect of Dasein as movement, considering that motion, either forward or backward in time, poses a neurotic threat to the equilibrium of the present 135 as a form of koinonia or consciousness.21 The analysis is somewhat tenuous in that Magliola is summarising Ludwig Binswanger's psychoanalytic reading of Heidegger. Yet the link between Heidegger and psychoanalysis is important to Simon's novel,for the narrator's experience of paradox as conflict directs him towards the moment of Dasein as a resolution Of temporal neurosis through art. Magliola selects a central quotation in Sein and Zeit to reveal how the present is generated by a futurality thrown back upon itself as the past. Temporality becomes self-cancelling in that the present exists as a moment for time, within yet freed from the latter: Only an entity which, in its Being, is essentially futural so that it is free for its death and can Iet itself be thrown back upon the factical "there" by shattering itself against death - that is to say, only an entity which, as futural, is equiprimordiallv in the process of having-been, can, by handing down to itself the possiEiIity it has inherited. take over its own thrownness and can be in the moment of vision for "its time". Only authentic temporality which is at the same time finite, makes possible something like fate - that is to say, authentic historicalitv. (BT: p. 437) Heidegger's analysis of time as a bidirectional flux is concerned to recuperate a transcendance within the eddy of time itself. Whereas Beckett analyses Joycean art as a "flood of movement and vitality" caused by a conjunction of perfect order and chaos, Simon's narrator attempts to enter a hiatus within the eddy of purgatorial time. As the disjunctive eye of the storm, the parenthesis of an art 136 which invites the movement of the spectator into its space offers protection against entropic forces already at work in the maelstrom. Heideggerian Dasein is especially appro- priate to the narrator's purpose since it permits a solution to the optical illusion of bilateral rotation. It is interesting to note that Simon himself has spoken of the composition of the last part of La Bataille de Phar- sale as pictural. In an interview with Claud DuVerlie, Simon relates how he organised the strands of the novel by assigning a colour to each theme and character and experi- mented visually with the charted order of their appearance. He further stresses that the final panel includes some of his best pages which were written solely for painterly balance: I was sometimes obliged, therefore and this is ygry important, to develOp certain themes for no other reason than that I was missing, Here or there, aglittle or a lot of one color or another. mhus, as you can see, certain passages were written for agormal" reasons of balance or composition. Simon's revelation is, naturally enough, superfluous to the evidence of the text. The last panel of the novel is written entirely in the present tense. The narrator seeks by this ploy to prevent the moribundity which earlier menaced him. In the excerpt from Valery the parenthesis of art had enclosed a morbid design of unexpectedly fatal dimensions. An indication that art may be less than well suited to 137 the narrator's goal may be gleaned from the incompleteness of the epigraph. The more complex relationship of the tool to Dasein is omitted in favour of a direct grasp of the tool as revealing the world. The passages chosen by Simon treat the presence of disfunctional tools, which betray a condition of conspicuousness (Puffalligheit), obtrusiveness (Aufdringlichkeit) or obstinacy (Aufsfissigkeit) (BT: p. 104). Respectively they are either found to be inappro- priate upon use, obviously inappropriate because the prOper tool is missing, or in need of repair. Heidegger proceeds from this analysis toward a consideration of the tool miss- ing in the second condition. He states that because the world is lit up only when the tool is damaged, the ready- to-hand tool itself loses its worldhood by becoming in— appropriate, merely present-at-hand. More simply stated the tool has loSt its worldly quality of purpose, it does not function, yet by the same token its intended function or worldhood becomes illuminated. This irony, which pre- vents the world from consisting circumspectivelv in readi- ness-to-hand necessitates a focus upon the apprOpriate tool, the one found to be missing. whe tool is present be- fore it is visible, "in the 'there' before anyone has ob- served or ascertained it" (BT: p. 105). In this condition the tool remains invisible and the world unannounced, per- mitting a phenomenal relation between the two: If it is to be possible for the ready-to-hand 138 not to emerge from its inconspicuousness, the world must notrannounce itself. And it is in this that the Being-in-itself of entities which are ready-to-hand has its phenomenal structure constituted. (BT; p. 106) The Heideggerian notion of Being-in-itself excludes the possibility that the tool be sighted in circumspection, a proviso upon which the artistic image depends. The tool and its contact cannot offer itself to the gaze, the French translation's equivalent for sighted in circumspection, for it is visibly missing, disclosed for circumspection but inaccessible to it. "It is itself inaccessible to circum- spection, so far as circumspection is always directed to- wards entities, but in each case it has already been dis- closed for circumspection." (BT; p.105) From the moment that the narrator attempts to turn the novel back upon itself as a contradiction, his proiect is undermined by the epigraphic content. The reutilisation of Proust, a symbol of failure, implies the prospect of un- success for the narrator's plan. The incomplete representa- tion of Heidegger renders evident the fallacy upon which the novelist's artistic project is based. Discourse apophanti- cally reveals its own mask larvatus prodeo. The reader is invited to study the novel's final section for what the narrator does not say and to accept what is present as incompatible with the world of the novel, which is phenomen- ally inconspicuous, unobtrusive and non-obstinate. In the novel the opposition between connotation and 139 denotation reflects the Heideggerian distinction between disclosure and circumspection in that connotation is pre- dicated discretely upon denotation as a meta-system of signification. The narrator's tale has implications which go beyond the material he presents as sighted in circum- spection; it has other dimensions disclosed for the narra- tor's circumspection but inaccessible to it. The narrator remains blissfully unaware of his drift towards oblivion, for he remains within the frame of denotative discourse. He does not suspect the connotation of death which subtends his fantasy. In Les Corps conducteurs the narrator will progress towards an inkling of his sequestered condition. The relationship of the narrators to the connotation of their stance in La Bataille de Pharsale and in its success- or constitutes a separate reading to be undertaken ubi infra in the chapter which follows. Germane to the present line of enquiry is a conclusion to the thesis that the narrator's reorganisation of purgatorial form has at best the character of illusion. In the third panel of the triptych the narrator's story adopts the form of a pictorial representation. The multiple points of view and identities offered to the narrator by a series of displacements in space and time are brought into conjunction. Art becomes a focal point in which the various points occupied successively by the story line may fuse as a single canvas, drawing the spectator into its inner space. 140 At one level the narrator has created a harmonious refuge where his own tale is assimilated to the movement into painterly space. His condition is synchronised as a move- ment out of past futurality into the Space of an eternal present. The space thus conceived is one which occupies the moment of flux itself. Two questions impose themselves upon the reader. The first relates to Heideggerian authen- ticity or belonging; whether the creation of a story in the image of Poussin's "Orion aveugle" can be an experience belonging to Dasein. Heidegger excludes the possibility that the context of the damaged tool, in this case the damage exists within the narrator's native language, French, which cannot translate "movement into space", can itself constitute Dasein. The story as it is told by the narrator is the context for the damage, as such it "has not become explicit as an ontological structure; but it has become explicit ontically for the circumspection which comes up against the damaging of the tool" (BT: p. 105). It is reasonable therefore to conclude with Magliola, that Simon's novel like Crane's poem, is an authentic experience of time for the Dasein of the tool. But in so far as the Dasein of the tool, novelistic discourse, understands itself, its apophantic function is to betray that understanding as mask. In La Bataille de Pharsale the role of the narrator is to participate fully in the Dasein of the tale, he does 141 not share in its apophansis. The narrator of the fiction is no novelist, for him the tale is plain unvarnished autobiography. The narrator's tale is not really his own in this regard, he is the function of the tale which corres- ponds to its Dasein. The novelist proper invades the Space of his text as the finger of lucidity, the authorial inter- locutor who points out the fiction apophantically. The novel is straightforward in that the narrator is not con- ceived as a second principle of apophansis. By comparison with the narrator of Les Corps conducteurs he is naive and unaware of his story's novelistic status. In narratological terms there is a clear absence of similarity between the authorial interlocutor and the narrator. At the moment when the narrator abandons his role by delegating the beginning of the novel to a third person, the novel ends: ”0 écrit: Jaune et puis noir temps d'un battement de paupiéres et puis jaune de nouveau" (BP; p. 271). Through the voice of the narrator, the novel engages in a limited self-deception. The novel turns away from the entropic significance of the pro- gressive petrifaction of the image towards the panacea of art as no more than the koinonia of Dasein, a narrative con- sciousness that understands its tale as truth. The indwell- ing author is happier not to envisage directly the temporal- ity of purgatory, the transience of the novelistic world. He preserves until the end the image of salvation, the illu- sion of relief in the centre of his gaze. The novel ends in 142 preparation for its beginning: Jealousy and suffering finally become ramifications of the distribution of objects scattered on 0's desk. In a manner reminiscent of Robbe Grillet's Dans le labyrinthe the relationship between inan- imate paraphernalia assumes responsibility for the novel's projected itinerary as the room becomes a metaphor for 0's mind at the first moment of writing. The ploy becomes transparent as 0 assumes the recognisable shape of the narrator. At this moment the narrator shows the symptoms of the sickness which affects his successor in Les Corps conducteurs, his double presence is a prelude to schizo— phrenic disjunction. The beginning is substituted for the end, salvation disguises damnation, setting a term to the novel as the fiction of indifferentism attains its full- blown proportion. According to the narrator's belief the final line does not appear as a cyclical recommencement of the novel, just as Joyce's spherical purgatory does not imply the reduplication of a circular track. The novel has returned through a semicircle to its point of origin, achieving a structural symmetry between life and art. In this respect the novel appears simply as a self-contradic- tion to the narrator, whereas it in fact preserves its status as paradox, for its apparent beginning is really its conclusion. The narrator observes himself writing the novel at one remove from himself. He has achieved his desired aim. His freedom expels him from the world of the 143 novel which then collapses. The narrator's abrogation of his proper activity Spares him the fate of schizophrenic behaviour. The narrator's behaviour disguises the temporal dimension of purgatory as a prOgression from conservation through entrOpy to death. What begins in the novel as a flood of vitality ebbs to the point of disjunction, but the narrator spares himself the image of the "vicious circle of humanity being achieved" by relegating it to the periphery of his vision. His is a self-indulgence that his successor in Les Corps conducteurs will not comfortably repeat. NOTES 1 Samuel Beckett, "Dante..Bruno.Vico...Joyce," in OurExagmination roundthis Factification for Incamination of Work In Progress (Paris: Shakespeare and Co., 1929): 2 Beckett, p. 22. 3 Saint Augustine, quoted by Samuel Beckett, in David Hesla, The Shape of Chaos (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minneapo- lis Press, 1971), p. 215, from Alan Schneider, "Waiting for Beckett: A personal chronicle", Chelsea Review, II (1958). 4 Beckett, "Dante..Bruno.Vico...Joyce," p. 22. 5 Claude Simon, La Bataille de Pharsale (Paris: Minuit, 1969) p. 67. Subsequent references are—included in the text so, (BP). 6 John Sturrock, The French New Novel (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969). P. 73. 7 Jean Ricardou, Pour une théorie du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1971), p. 129. 8 Randi Birn, "Proust, Claude Simon, and the Art of the Novel," Papers on Language and Literature, 13, no. 2 (1977), p. 170. 9 J.A.E. Loubere, "Views Through the Screen: In-site in Claude Simon,” Yale French Studies 57 (1979). p. 38. 10 Loubere, p. 38. 144 145 11 David Carroll, "Diachrony and Synchrony in His- toire," MLN 92 (1977), p. 803. 12 Birn, p. 171. 13 Birn, p. 171. 14 Carroll, p. 823. 15 Carroll, p. 823. 16 Carroll, p. 823. 17 Claude Simon: Anal se Théorie, directed by Jean Ricardou (Paris: U.G.R. 10718, 1975), p. 365. 18 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson'TNew York: Harper and Row, 1962). p. 96. Subsequent references appear in text so, (BT). 19 Robert Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature (West Lafayette: Purdue Univ. Press, 1977), p. 60. 2° Magliola, p. 59. 21 Magliola, p. 59. 22 Claude Simon, in Claud DuVerlie, "Interview with Claude Simon," Sub-Stance, 8 (1974) 11. CHAPTER IV THE DESIGN OF ENTROPY The sometimes self-contradictory statements issued by Claude Simon concerning his work reflect the ambivalent attitude of a critic too discerning to reduce his own novelistic practice to an overly rigorous interpretation yet concerned nevertheless to do so. His preferred stance is that of the literary artisan, whose ambition appears to be confined to the pursuit of an elusive unity of form: C'est une unité formelle. Un livre doit se tenir comme une table sur quatre pieds. Je n'ai pas de preoccupations que celles d'un artisan qui fait un objet. Simon is quick to introduce a sophistication into his project, one which depends upon a principle of elusion. Experience resembles a sieve, fragmenting that part of perception which passes through it, omitting the undigested portion. While Simon does not employ this particular meta- phor, it is apparent that his view of the literary work of art begins with the memory, the filtered material of per- ception. His task is the reconstitution of fragments into the familiar paradox of an incomplete whole: one more than the sum of its parts: 146 147 Le monde extérieur vient s'inscrire en nous sous la forme de fragments. Nous sommes absolument incapables de saisir une continuité. (...) Les trous peuplent notre mémoire: c'est un manteau déchiré. (...) Les trous, i1 faut les laisser. The word ”absolument" denotes the intrusion of wishful thinking in the above quotation, for continuity is shown to subsist on one level at least in the very notion of the mantle as a whole. The ”manteau tout déchiré” is an oxy- moronic object, participating in the realms of the partial and the total. Sensitive to the equivocal status of the literary artefact, Simon nevertheless privileges its discon- tinuous aspect in his critical persuasion. It is not until Legon de Choses that what is missing from his work will assume importance equal to the fragments which are present, and a unity reminiscent of that of the Taoists will be ad- mitted. In the meantime Simon will pursue, in his novels and in his interviews, an investigation of what is present in his writing. He will examine the table, not the space between the legs which is a condition for the table's pre- sence. He confines his effort to challenge the traditional nature of the novel form to the realm of denotation, even though he is aware of the connotative aspect of his writing. Simon's project undergoes no radical change before Legon de choses,but he would like to think it does, which leads him to speak enthusiastically of breakthroughs, only subsequent- ly to moderate his language. Claude Simon has described Les Corps conducteurs as a 148 novelistic undertaking akin to the concluding section of La Bataille de Pharsale: "Avec la derniére partie de La Bataille de Pharsale et avec Les Corps conducteurs, c'est encore une autre rupture. J'eSpére étre arrive a quelque "3 But on another occasion, Simon chose de plus propre..... relates the last part of La Bataille de Pharsale to parts of earlier novels, Histoire and La Route des Flandres as 4 examples of a purely formal activity of composition. Les Corps conducteurs and its illustrated portion, published separately as Orion Aveugle are said to differ from the earlier works in that the whole of the two later works are concerned with a formal emphasis which appears only inter- mittently in previous novels. In retrOSpect Simon will classify Les Corps conducteurs with its predecessors as falling a prey to determinism of a psychological order. Simon does not always refer to changes in his literary enterprise in terms of a break. In an interview with Claud DuVerlie, Simon will reject the idea of a break, softening the term to a turning point prefaced by a slow evolution.5 Simon is concerned with the removal of scoria from his work. Etymoloqically a description of animal fecal matter, the word is used by Simon to refer to the convention of realism? His production in this regard is marked by a gradual move- ment away from characterisation in the novel, punctuated by more energetic attempts to break free. Simon is anxious to remove the narrator from the dimension of character 149 altogether. The narrative voice must not become confused with the identity of a protagonist. This preoccupation has two unfortunate results. The first is complex for it deals with the attitude of the narrative voice. The narra- tor implicitly suggests that the novelist at work, is in fact, none other than the narrator himself, an act of hybris which again privileges the part over the whole and intro- duces a level of fantasy. The floating point of view of the narrative voice overlays and attempts to supplant the pre- sence of the indwelling author. Secondly and ironically, the narrative voice does not immediately succeed in abandon- ing the identity of the protagonist. The consequences of Simon's attempted suppression of the narrator as a character stem from a disregard for the narratological status of the narrative voice within the literary work. The narrative voice may enjoy no fixed identity in that it may have no single person as its referent, but it is always identifiable by certain behavioural characteristics. Stated differently, it will emerge from its background by virtue of its dealing with an environment, its physical and attitudinal disposi- tion towards a subject matter. The indwelling author, by contrast, remains immanent to the backdrop as it is framed by the narrator's attention, and may be discerned in the tension between the latter and his surroundings as he seeks to mould his context to the shape of his desire. Les Corps conducteurs posits a narrative voice whose 150 behaviour is remarkably similar to that of a sick man telling a story. It is a questing voice,making free with the possible variations of its attribution, at times by use of style indirecte libre it invades the consciousness of the sick man; but it does not localise itself in time and space with any permanence. There is no particular reason not to associate the narrator with the sick man, to the chagrin of Simon himself, but to the satisfaction of the tenets of literary realism. Convention demands that the reader expect a possible referent for the disembodied narrator. The novel may be read as an attempt to give meaning to a world de- formed by delirium simply by assigning a name to a voice. The novel is more varied and fascinating when the above reading is correlated to a broader sense of suffering. Sickness as metaphor accedes to a universality of tone when applied to the behaviour of a narrator never quite in full control of his tale. The theme of conflict between man and his environment is ageless and englobes the limited case of actual malady in many possible interpretations. Les Corps conducteurs is also the tale of nostalgia for past omnipo- tence and of the web of self-deception spread by a narrator anxious to regain the illusion of mastery but, ironically, not by employing the obsolete methods of literary realism. Claud DuVerlie touches upon the interpretive freedom of the reader in his interview with Claude Simon for the review Sub-stance. Simon likens the reader's task to his 151 own in that the reader will give preference deliberately and involuntarily to particular connotative links between words: Since each word I write has several connotations, and since each reader, like, myself, consciously or unconsciously gives greater importance to one of these connotations, you need only multiply each of these preferred connotations by the thousands in a novel to realize that I would be crazy not to expect each reader to see very different things in a text than I do.7 Simon is leaving open the possibility that his novels may not mean only what he thinks he wants them to mean. Cer- tainly he never envisaged the narrator as the sick man, although that choice is in many ways logical. In fact he prefers not to think of the narrative voice as reflective of a state of mind but as a mirror for linguistic activity. In a tale told by an idiot nothing is signified, so Macbeth informs us. The question arises as to whether an idiot is prOperly human, or is himself an equation for nothingness. In the first case the partial objects of dis- course, the disjointed elements of the tale are to be attributed to the frame of a schizophrenically split mind. They are a flight of images, uncoordinated yet somehow the idiot's own. A second possibility is that the fragmentary discourse is alienated from the sense of its origin; it preempts the responsibility for its own utterance from the incompetence of a mind disfunctional for all pragmatic purposes. The idiot's behaviour is than mechanical not human, automatic rather than purposive. Characterized by 152 a temporal reversal, the second option isolates the tale from its author, the tale precedes any attribution to a meaningful telling. The vexed relation of primordiality between language and the unconscious is exploited by Simon through his narrators, whose presence denotes an activity indistinguish- able from that of a random factor in language. Les Corps conducteurs concludes with a transposition of the sick man into a blueprint. It is in the domain of connotation that Simon's works have been little appreciated. As he himself admits, his words have several connotations. More than that, however, his manner of linking words, images and anecdotes have connotative possibilities. It is the latter quality which differentiates between his works and schizOphrenic dis- course. A proviso should attend the readings to be undertaken of La Bataille de Pharsale and Les Corps conducteurs, namely that where it is possible to read these novels correctly as mirroring a recognisable set of preoccupations or frame of mind, such a reading cannot simply be set aside in favour of another. The pathetic fallacy permits the interpreter to seek freely the mirror of his soul in nature. The novel as representation confines the accurate reader to the horizons of a preallable system of interpretation as well of constitution; the world has already been 153 noematically presented as such. When connotation is present in Simon's novels, it demands to be transcoded by the reader as an ancillary but vital adjunct to denotation. Simply to ignore it is to become enfolded by the narrator's overt strategy and to miss his underlying purpose. The above contingency serves to qualify Simon's own exprOpriation of Michel Deguy's thesis that language precedes utterance. Simon's contention obfuscates the role of the indwelling author because it subscribes to a view of the narrative voice as purely linguistic. Although Simon himself is too flexible to be caught by his own definition, his position does imply that while a narration has a beginning and an end,it has no purposeful relation to them: they are necess- arily as arbitrary as the linguistic activity that forged them. There is no struggle to impose a will upon the shaping of events and hence no tension in which to accommo- date the figure of an indwelling author. A post-script to earlier discussion on the cartoon analysed in La Bataille de Pharsale is now appropriate in order to underline the paradoxical relationship between covert narratorial intention and the recalcitrance of the narrator's environment. For the narrator's purpose the triptych of the cartoon perfectly fits the compositional symmetry of the novel as a mise en abyme. The choice of a cartoon, however, has a suggestion of triviality which undermines its symbolic seriousness as a paradigm for 154 interpretation. The triptych first appears in Simon's work, Le Vent, in the subtitle as a baroque altarpiece. The desacralisa- tion of the ternary image in La Bataille de Pharsale connotes a shift of value away from the religious subject of the triptych although its ternary form continues to dominate.8 The cartoon is enmeshed in a web of associations "9 at the which invite a comparison of the "bouche sanglante centre of its hemiSphere to a composition of Polidores da Caravaggio in which the warrior receives a sword thrust into his mouth: "Dans quelques instants le guerrier va recevoir un coup de glaive qui entrera par sa bouche ouverte. La pointe du glaive ressortira par la nugue" (BP; p. 200). The associative power of the image is demon- strated by its migration to different subjects. The narra- tor feels that his heart will burst through his mouth as he flees along a railroad track during the battle of the Meuse. A female spectator, Open-mouthed at the prospect before her, forms part of the canvas entitled "Jalousie". The associations of images brings about a collaboration in which the themes of war, death and love appear to be in collusion: elle suspendue sous son ventre gracile 1e buvant enfoncé dans la bouche un coup de glaive si violente que le point en ressortit ar... chancelant la bouche ouverte proférant 155 d'inconpréhensibles menaces 1e sabre qu'il faisait tournoyer au-dessus de sa téte étincelante. (BP; p. 75) Eros and Thanatos conjoin in oxymoronic counterpoint. ”Dard dans la bouche, mort dans l'ame je ne savais pas" (BP; p. 22), and lend an Oedipal configuration to the structure of association. Crastinus, who spills the first Roman blood is cursed to relive the feeling of his death in expiation of his symbolic parricide: Lucain, Phars; VII, 470-473: Puissent les dieux te donner non pas la mort, qui est le chatiment réservé a tous, mais, aprés ton destin fatal, 1e sentiment de ta mort, Crastinus, toi, dont la main brandit 1a lance qui engagea 1e combat et la premiere teignit 1a Thessalie de sang roman! (BP: p. 235) Crastinus, Caesar's representative, is he who attacks the fatherland by his gesture against fellow Romans. In return he will receive retribution from one of Pompey's soldiers. Pompey thereby attacks his fatherrin-law, Caesar. The open mouth of the cartoon figure has taken on the configuration of the Oedipus myth. The death of Crastinus is also woven into images of blindness and infi- delity through the agency of the open mouth. The "bouche rose ouverte 05” (3?; p. 25) will later possess the open and pink texture of the male member and of blindness: ”d'un teinte rose et percée au centre de son orifice, comme un oeil aveugle” (BP; p. 212). Blindness will later be associated explicitly to blood in Triptyque through the 156 bleeding eye of the dying rabbit. In La Bataille de Phar- salg, the theme of blindness already prefigures the title of Les Corps conducteurs in its abridged, illustrated ver- sion Orion Aveugle. The face of the giant warrior in La Bataille de Pharsale is bloody (BP; p. 256), and blind: "ce Goliath ou plut6t cet Orion titubait en aveugle” (BP; p. 140). The depiction of instability and mutilation which functions as a subversion of the novel's apparently harmon- ious narrative structure forms a grid of associations of which the bleeding mouth of the perfidious Eve is a focal point, just as the mid-point of the novel itself "0” will reveal itself to be a self-deforming mobile. The achieve- ment of a calm splendour of form is itself possible only to those who penetrate nature's indifference, ”ceux qui ont pénétré l'indifférenceckala nature devant 1e massacre et l'amour" (BP; p. 119). The image of penetration becomes associated to the Spectator drawn into the eye of the mael- strom of battle, ”mais, maintenant au centre méme de ce maelstrém” (BP; p. 116). He finds he has left the dead calm of aesthetic distance. In war the only stasis is one of perpetual motion ”le cheval galopant sur place" (BP; p. 116). The calm splendour of artistic form is inseparable from the mortal paroxysm of war, ”1e tapage figé a ce niveau paroxysmique 08 i1 se détruit lui-méme, immobilisé lui aussi dans le silence" (BP; p. 118). It is a convulsion 157 analogous to that experienced by the lovers as the act of penetration is interrupted by the sound of steps in the hallway. Orgasm is replaced by Medusan petrifaction. "Les deux corps restent ainsi, comme changes en pierre, dans la position exacte ou ils se trouvaient quand elle a entendu les pas, le membre raidi et luisant de l'homme a moitié enfoncé en elle" (BP; p. 247). The couple will be imaginatively transformed into weathered marble in later descriptions, and the man will have withdrawn from his partner. The moment of passage between life and art is one of interpenetration, as love and death conjoin with form. The narrator as artist professes to seek a splendid calm, but dwells upon the act of coupling movement to sta- sis, the consubstantial achievement of a rite de passage. His marginal notation about the incurable stupidity of the French is made when reading Elie Faure on the German painters of the Renaissance. She criticises them for never attaining an overall affect. Their universe is one of fragments, an indefinite repetition of detail. The narra- tor himself expresses a Germanic bent in his obsessive preoccupation with the instant of transition to the detri- ment of formal unity: "1e détail masque toujours l'ensem- ble, leur univers n'est pas continu, mais fait de frag- ments juxtaposes. (...) 0 sort de sa poche un stylomine et écrit dans la marge: Incurable bétise frangaise" (BP; p. 238). 158 Love and death undermine the narrator's pictorial enterprise: they impart a sense of closure to the Openness of a painterly text. The canvas of the German Renaissance artists had neither beginning nor end; they were deliber- ately incomplete. An unfinished quality was manifest in the structural discontinuity of the detail. The narrator cannot duplicate formal disunity at the thematic level of his work, for the consistency of his endeavour defies him. He con- stantly associates his task to the arrest of conflict. Struggle predicts the cessation of both the life and the death instinct, labelled by DuVerlie as Bros and Thana- tos. DuVerlie's article, "Eroticism in the Works of Claude Simon”,10 sets out to redefine Eros in the context of Simon's novels. DuVerlie begins by underlining two tradi- tional aspects of eroticism: the principle of pleasure or sensuality, and the relationship of the self to the other. He next introduces a more recent thesis, the participation of the spiritual dimension in procreation. His carefully documented prefatory remarks prepare for the pairing of Eros with Thanatos. From the association of physical love to Spirituality Springs the life principle of Eros. DuVerlie's communication turns away from a pepular compari- son of Simon with Georges Bataille in the association of love and death. The state of lipidation, Bataille's term for the destruction of the person through the sexual act, is seen by DuVerlie as only part of a wider panorama of 159 love relationships in Simon‘s work. DuVerlie's article concludes with a commentary upon eroticism in La Bataille de Pharsale. The passage he selects is that which speaks ll of form in the context of love and massacre. The most satisfying erotic experience is that of the artist as voyeur struggling in desperation to transform the past into a present and tangible reality. DuVerlie does not pursue this insight into the language of frustration in the direction of Eros' counterpart, Thanatos. The life instinct is not Simply transformed into the death wish as DuVerlie at one point remarks, for death itself is a prey to what DuVerlie terms ”aesthetic sublimation".12 In this respect death is to be distinguished from the feeling of death, "1e sentiment de ta mort", a sensation provoked by the interruption of massacre as well as of love. Death is suspended; Genette's term vertige fixél3 corres- ponds as well to the narrator's apprehension of the reality of massacre, "1e tapage figé” as it does to the arrested lovemaking of the couple. At this moment time is not in a state of suspension, only death. There is a principle of entropy at work in the interruption of loving and killing. DuVerlie remarks of the act of love: In this perspective interruptio shows man finally cast out of eternal nature, and ultimately subjected to the ”nonchalant and destructive work of time".14 Images of interruption produce a tension between the 160 narrator's express desire to escape into formal tranquil- ity and his apparent preference for the instant of escap- ing rather than the accomplishment of the act. The narra- tor reveals a different order of intelligibility, that of the indwelling author, in his foregrounding against a backdrop of transition. The narrator's dilemma resembles that of Crastinus in so far as the indwelling author em- bodies the presence of the gods, ”les dieux" (BP; p. 235). But he only indirectly controls the narrator's behaviour. The feeling of death is not experienced by the narrator directly, for he believes he can escape into the foreground of art. In point of fact the narrator's environment is controlled by a paradoxical conjunction of motion and stasis. Poussin's painting offers the narrator an escape into Space, but the space of Orion Aveugle is also the con- ceit of Achilles running motionless; it is not a flat aesthetic calm, but an interruption. Les Cogps conducteurs, a novel which calls extensively upon the image of Orion, provides a clear example of the entropic function of purgatorial experience. The world of the indwelling author is one in which time works towards an ending of the moment of struggle, the flood of vitality released as purgatory is formed and the novel begins. The narrator, a part of that world, escapes into the domain of representation only at the moment of release, at the novel's close. Passage from the universe of love and death 161 into a formal calm implies the breakdown of the novel into two lifeless elements, the hell of love and death and the heaven of splendid form. Purgatory, and the novel, cannot survive the disjunction. The propounding of a sense of closure in Simon's novels is adduced from the evidence of connotation, the meaning behind the narrator's pretence of indifferentism. It is not surprising that such a reading should be something of an heretical statement in the current climate of Ricardolian criticism. Deleuze and Guattari see in schizOphrenia an affirmation of man's freedom from Oedipus. For Simon's indwelling author a liberty of the like is a hope to live for, not one that can be lived out. What the narrator experiences as eternal liberation in his movement into Space the reader cannot wholly share. The latter must also participate in the feeling of death, a confinement to the Oedipal pattern and to the sense of an ending purveyed by the novel as a whole. Robert J. Lifton in his recent work on depth psycholo- gy ”The Life of the Self”, notes that death and life, as discontinuous and continuous forms respectively, are images paradigmatic for an understanding of the human condition. In his observation on the symptoms of death anxiety he lists three characteristic aspects; these may be extrapo- lated as generally applicable to the level of the fragment in discourse: 162 At every develOpmental level all conflicts exacerbate, and are exacerbated by, these three aspects of what later becomes death anxiety - that is, disintegration, stasis, or separation. Maintaining the perspective of death and life as a forma- tive paradigm, Lifton turns to a discussion of schizo- phrenia as a state of psychic numbing; his comments are a well chosen portrayal of the schizophrenic propensities of Simon's narrators: The schizophrenic experiences a pathetic illusion of omnipotence, a despairing mask of pseudo-immortality,because he is blocked in the most fundamental wig from authentic connection or continuity. The transmission of life into art, in La Bataille de Pharsale, is accompanied by the tell-tale schiZOphrenic signs noted by Lifton, of desymbolisation, deformation and a displaced desire for life without life. Frangoise von Rossum-Guyon, a close colleague of Jean Ricardou at Cerisy notes the petrifaction of the image in the last section of the novel as a process of immortalisation: "1e couple d'aujourd'hui rejoint l'infinité des couples de toujours";7 The narrator of La Bataille de Pharsale is fated to achieve only pseudo-immortality, for as he begins the rewriting of his novel he ends the work. For the narrator, as for the schizoid mentality, an illusion of power conceals an ab- sence of potential: "Life is counterfeit, inner death n 18 predominant and biological death unacceptable . The narra- tor is blocked from the authentic experience of the 163 indwelling author who is at one with his work. The narra- tor cannot escape from his own condition as a fragment of the whole, and experiences the consequent anxiety of his position. Orion and the man's sickness are both creations of a narrator obsessed with his own condition, blindly groping along a predetermined path in the illusion of self-deter- mination. Orion's heliotrOpic progress is guided by a small figure on his shoulder, the dwarfish Cedalion, leading him towards the sun. Orion does not regain his sight in the novel, but will disappear into the morning rays, a reading at odds with mythological evidence. Cedalion, himself, is a symbol for initiation in Greek mythology. His relation- ship to Hephaestus, as either father or son, is that of an instructor for the artisan, the spirit of work in progress. Orion must delegate vision to Cedalion in a way similar to the narrator's relinquishment of control to the indwell- ing author, a fact which the narrator, like Simon himself, alludes to in a spirit of self-deception. Simon, quoting a friend, Raoul Dufy, attributes his creation to the free- dom of artistic process, not to a lack of control over his unconscious intentions: ”Il faut savoit abandonner le tableau qu'on a voulu faire au profit de celui qui se fait”.19 The relation of the narrator to the indwelling author is akin to that of the conscious to the unconscious mind. 164 The narrator refuses to succumb to forces beyond his control even though he imaginatively foresees his ultimate disaggre- gation. Orion is described in Les Cogps conducteurs as perceived in the act of vanishing as the morning assimilates his quest: Un de ses bras tendus en avant, tatonnant dans le vide, Orion avance toujours en direction du soleil levant, guide dans sa marche par la voix et les indications du petit personnage juché sur ses épaules musculeuses. Tout indique cependant qu'il n'atteindra jamais son but, puisque a mesure que le soleil s'éléve, les étoiles qui dessinent le corps du géant palissent, s'effacent, et la fabuleuse silhouette immobile a grands pas s'estompera peu a peu ausqu'a disparaitre dans le ciel d'aurore.2 The passage from present to future tense in the description of Orion transposes the reader from Poussin's artistic statement to the narrator's activity of interpre- tive prediction. Two images of Orion are superimposed. The first is taken from an early incident in Orion's life, in which Orion regains his sight by travelling towards the sun. The second relates to the death of Orion, at which time, according to popular mythology, he was transported to the heavens, where he assumed the shape of the constellation with which he is commonly identified. The narrator prefers to assume that Orion cannot reach the sun but must dis- appear with the early morning light. It would be more in keeping with the subject matter of the painting to render the sun's light as a metaphor for sight and, while admitting that Orion's astral figure will shortly fade, to recognise 165 in the latter process, the curious realisation of Orion's project, namely that of regaining his vision as the land- scape is illuminated and obscurity reduced. The narrator maintains a simple dichotomy between dark and light in his impressionistic commentary, one which offers the temptation of claiming that his direct response to the painting is no less irrefutable than the dissenting evidence of mythology. The conflictual presence of both Cedalion and the stars framing the giant form endows the painting with an ambiva- lence of intention that is a feature of anomaly. That the narrator should choose to ignore the anachronistic ambigu- ity, and he does not make the choice explicitly, acts as a repression of goal oriented behaviour on the part of Orion, for everything indicates "Tout indique" that the fruition of the latter's quest is to be forestalled, just as his endeavour will be foreshortened. The narrator's reading of the painting is in this single respect unsophisticated, for the everything to which he refers can only be regarded as the entirety of his emotive reaction, rather than the ana- lytical dilemma provoked by a disregard for chronology in the painting itself. There is no reason to suSpect that the narrator is expressly concerned to misrepresent the complexity afforded by the canvas. More interestingly from the perspective of the present reading, the narrator can be seen to betray a compulsive suppression of the realisation of Orion's quest. To account for the narrator's reading 166 as a genuine error would not address the self-projection which he implicitly manifests in his employment of the term, everything. The ramifications of this apparently innocent misreading appear immediately in the text as a ser- ies of geometrical constructs which accelerate towards the novel's end. The longitudinal cross-sections permit obser- vation of a succession of identical rooms, an aircraft fuselage and a human head in profile reSpectively. The narrative voice is transposed once more into the body of the sick man making his way along a corridor and into a room. The description is marked by an admixture of feverish imme- diacy and clinical self-detachment. The first cross-section occurs at the initial moment before the fever recedes and is couched in the language of hypothesis: it would permit observation of the rooms, "permettrait de voir". The activ- ity of the peOple in the rooms is related by resorting to participial and infinitive forms of the verbs as a manner of rendering the conditional mode more present and vital. The fever and the narrative voice leave the sick man as he halts in order to recover from his vertigo. As the narrator shifts between identities and perspectives his voice retains a consistency of concern with the prospect of an ending. The narrator briefly envisages two scenes: the second con- tained within the first. A young journalist offers his lips to his companion and she, likewise a young journalist, res- ponds. This short scene, played out in duple time, is 167 interrupted at its midpoint by a comparatively lengthy reprise of a woman drinking the last drops from a bowl and weeping. Attention is focused upon the disappearance of geometrically patterned light relections. The effect of the intercalated scenes upon the narration is to provoke a return to the predicament of the sick man as he loses his balance. In terms of the temporality of the narration but not of the progress of the man's illness, the brief respite has exacerbated the latter's condition, a logic at variance with the expected result of catching one's breath "en reprenant son souffle” (Cc: p. 223). Indeed, the man has been called to further efforts in the reader's absence since he is now discovered entering a room and collapsing. The absence of the disembodied narrator may be said to have aggravated the sick man's condition. In corroboration of this interpretive stance, the narrative may be seen to proceed to two further cross-sec- tions. The sick man has recovered from his attack of giddiness, but remains horizontal on all fours. Symboli- cally this position is at variance with the vertical pos- ture he had previously assumed, and with the upright dis- position of the walls; it is now the carpet which appears to have replaced the walls "a la verticale" (Cc; p. 225). The deterioration of the Sick man had been prefigured in the scene detailing the coffee drinker by the interplay of light forms. The gradual decay of sharply defined 168 positions is first noticeable in the effect of shifting between vertical perspectives. "Peu a peu le parallelo- gramme de soleil se resserre entre ses catés verticaux, au point de ne plus former bient6t qu'une barre de plus en plus étroite“ (Cc: p. 224). The reduction of perspective to a single plane permits symbolic confusion between three and two dimensional forms, between life and geometrical patterns. The planometric surface of the cross-section is no longer distinguished by the conditional mood from the present moment of the narration. The cross-section of the fuselage displays, "montre" (Cc; p. 225) the routine activity of passengers, who, like dummies "comme des mannequins" (Cc: p. 225) are absorbed in the motionless pursuits of contemplation or slumber. They mirror the equilibrium to which the sick man's environment will return: "pen a pen les formes tournoyantes ralentissent leur mouvement, s'immobilisent enfin" (Cc; p. 225). A further cross-section, that of a head in profile, reveals, ”permet de voir" (Cc; p. 226) the principal organs of the head. The image is remarkable in that it becomes virtually indistinguishable from living matter; there is no simile to remind the reader of the presence of lifeless forms, and the brain can be observed to distend rhythmically to the pulse of the circulatory system. Upon closer examination a significant omission has 169 occurred, one justified in part by the sectioning of a profile: there is no reference to the organs of hearing. The second cross-section is correlated to the senses of the sick man, who has experienced a rush of blood to the head attendant upon a sudden fall and his feverish condition. The sick man is conscious of the blood beating in his ears as a hearing impairment. It acts as a filter, permitting the sound of the aircraft to be heard against a background of internal noise: Parvenant de trés loin a travers 1e bruit assourdissant du sang dans ses oreilles, il peut entendre le grondement tenu d'un avion qui traverse le ciel au-dessus de la ville. (Cc: p. 225) The cross-section contrasts with the presentation of the sick man's hearing; it normalises the function of the brain and the eye. A curious inversion has occurred: whereas the ear is accustomed to perceive noise diachronically, the visual image is synchronic in composition. In the case of the foregoing diptych, however, it is the sick man who hears simultaneously a medley of uninterrupted sounds and the eye which acts photoqraphically recording a series of images; "la mince membrane de la rétine sur laquelle les images du monde viennent se plaquer, glisser, l'une prenant la place de l'autre" (Cc: p. 226). The curative value of the cross-section is brought into pre-eminence; it permits the normalcy of healthy function by an interpenetration of the living form with its representational corollary, the 170 flatness of the invalid's hearing is rounded out by its visual approximation. A reading of art as a remedial process largely satis- fies Girard's view of the novel as exorcism; but what of his admonition that the truth of desire is death, "La vérité du désir est la mort?"21 The literary conceit of the eye draws attention to itself as a fiction of life, one which infuses the novel's anatomy with vitality. The life of the narrator has now ebbed to the point where he no longer detaches himself from the work of art but chooses to live through it. The devil's bargain of artistic represen- tation is inversely proportioned, for art, attaining pre— dominance, draws upon the life of its creator. The novel concludes with the attrition of the narrative voice to the threadbare level of the carpet, the conducting body becomes a lifeless skein of arterial connections. The narrator's situation results in his partaking of both salvation and damnation, he is both the patient and the demon of the text in Girardian terms. At the end however, he has no awareness of his plight. The weft and warp of the carpet are just another symbol of the blue print which promises immortality to the schiZOphrenic mind. Death appears only at the level of the indwelling author, the readerly interpretation of the narrator's condition. A recent article by J.A.E. Loubere, "Views Through the Screen: In-Site in Claude Simon", suggests by its 171 post-colonic title that insight is gained in situ, embedded within the organ of vision. She notes the precision, "the clinical care",22 with which the novelist examines the conditions for perception in the passage which depicts the final cross-section. Her article concludes that Simon eschews any privileged vieWpoint, seeking to apprehend the autogenerative properties of space through his use of setting, "his eye pierces what Faulkner calls the 'teeming 23 Loubere has solidarity' of things, in all directions". grasped on one level, the principle of self referential production in Simon's discourse, a projection by association of signifiers and signifieds. Even while admitting the possibility of great complexity in the connective tissue of Simon's language, recognition must be given to the narra- tor's relation to his language. He generates linguistic ludicity but his creation is indirectly controlled by his own dependence upon the indwelling author. The narrator is more than the stylisation of a particular aspect of a behavioural pattern. It is not so much that there is no privileged narrative viewpoint as Loubere suggests; every moment is equally privileged over what is not said. Other- wise the narrator's space would become formless, rather than multiform as Loubere proposes. Accordingly the impersonal surgical detachment with which the final cross-section is apparently described accedes to a second interpretation based upon language as a verbal semblance of human conduct. 172 What appears as robotic exactitude is also the clarity which characterises the hallucinatory state of schiZOphren- ia and the delirium of physical malady. The existence of the narrative voice is caught up and enmeshed in the fevered deformation of perception which concludes with a synaesthe- tic inversion of normal function, the ear sees. It is dramatic irony for Simon that the perception of the narrator and the sick man appear identical rather than parallel at this moment; it is a misreading justified by the convention of realism. The debris which litters the carpet in the final passage evidenceSthe devastation attendant upon clarity pushed to its extreme utterance. The human detritus "che- veux" is levelled down to the status of waste matter, "poil" and "poussiére" (Cc; p. 226). The microsc0pic traces are amplified by the proximity of the narrator's gaze to reflect the position he himself finally occupies, as the shreds of his mortality cling to the skeletal frame of the carpet's threads, "les raies paralléles et grises de la trame mise a nu” (Cc; p. 226). The feeling of death itself becomes the more convincing when systematically adduced from the proqress of the narra- tion. The actual demise of the sick man is nowhere clearly stated, yet it is on a note of finality that the narrative voice is extinguished. Logically it has transferred percep- tion to the realm of representation and in so doing must 173 record its own demise. In attributing a causality to the notion of poetic closure in Les Corps conducteurs, a certain circularity in the linkage of cause and effect is to be noted. One event does not lead to another in any conventional sense, but, given the order of their appearance a growing concern may be detected on the part of the narrator to state that each of the seven anecdotes which compose the novel serve as a commentary on the futility of arbitrary progressions. The final pages reflect the narrator's anxiety in its most accelerated form as he recognises the inevitability of discontinuing each of the series. The exhaustion of the sick man does not simply entail an unpremeditated conclusion to each of the other series. Tom BishOp cites Simon himself in confirming that the exhaustion of the sick man brings about the end of an inexhaustible novel, but Bishop does not quote the text of Les Corps conducteurs itself: Et cependant, a la fin des Corps conducteurs, nous ne sommes pas parvenus a une "conclusion". Le voyage dans lequel Simon nous a entrainés ne peut avoir "d'autre terme que l'épuisement du voyageur” - ce voyageur qui, épuisé autant par l'été new yorkais que par son malaise, réussit enfin a regagner son h6tel pour S'écrouler enfin sur la moguette de sa chambre. La paysaqe du livre étant "inépuisable" le narrateur doit y apposer un point final a un moment arbitraire de sa narration. Signs of closure are evident in each of the series before the collapse of the sick man. The shrinking column of men in the jungle reaches the point of disunity. No one 174 looks back, the stragglers are left to fend for themselves, and each man is a straggler in relation to the man ahead of him: A chaque halte ils sont moins nombreux (...) Bientbt les espaces s'agrandissent de nouveau entre eux, mais, comme le chef, aucun ne tourne plus la téte pour regarder derriére lui. (Cc; p. 208) The column is lost, the chief can understand neither the native porters nor his map. The column will not meander aimlessly for ever just because it has lost its destination, for the men are exhausted, ”les marcheurs épuisés" (Cc; p. 212). The sequence cannot long continue. In other sequen- ces dawn is a Sign of closure, it frustrates Orion's quest and seems to infiltrate the room of the literature confer- ence, heretofore hermetically sealed against external elements: 11 semble qu'une lueur grise commence a filtrer entre le cbté de l'une des fenétres et le bord mal joint (peut-étre dérangé par le frottement d'une chaise) du rideau de velours qui l'aveugle. (Cc; p. 222) Dawn is the moment for a tropical bird of the Barbet family ”le Barbu orange" (Cc; p. 215) to commence its dis- play ritual in the mating season, 'Dés l'aube, i1 fait de grands sauts sur place, déploie les ailes, étale sa queue en éventail" (Cc; p. 216). The light penetrating the room of the literature conference signals by association the lovemaking of the two journalists. Their activity diverts the narrator's patient attention to the lengthy perorations 175 of a moribund conference. The narrator appears unsure that light is actually coming into the room. It is as though he is half aware of imposing the change in environment that he needs. It will provide him with a pretext to end the sequence in an optimistic way. At the moment when the life instinct of Eros appears, termination of the sequence becomes the interruption of eroticism. In DuVerlie's terms, a condition for aesthetic sublimation has occurred; it heralds the transubstantiation of the Sick man into blue print. In a further sequence the aircraft reaches the symbolic end of its flight. The reappearance of the air- craft at the critical moment of the sick man's collapse is hardly fortuitous, as it permits a thematic transition into the blue print. The craft itself has no single destination; implicit in its design is a plurality of journeys. It is appropriate that it Should become motionless in flight, the noise of its engines coinciding with its inscription as a cross-section. Like Orion, the arrested movement of the aircraft prefigures the narrator's disappearance. Horizontal progressions in themselves imply the entro- pic process. In thermodynamics conservation and entropy condition each other in a particular way. Energy cannot disappear, but tends from the useful to the useless. The admixture of opposite forms may produce an identity in formal composition that precludes further activity. Where the change occurs there is positive as Opposed to zero 176 entropy. Whereas a mixture of hot and cold water produces luke-warm water, the product, when separated and recombined produces no change, it is still luke-warm. Similarly the conjunction of heaven and hell releases purgatory as a flood of vitality. Purgatory becomes inactive once the principles of heaven and hell achieve complete interpenetration. The dramatic change in human eyes occurs at the end of the process, when continuity of action finally yields exhausted to the discontinuity of inertia, a phenomenon known in thermodynamics as heat death. For this reason the perturba- tion of the narrator in Les Corps conducteurs is most in evidence at the end of the work. The narrator chooses images that mark the transition from upright to prostrate, life to death. The impassive exterior of the elevator shaft conveys an impression of zero entropy. There is no apparent upward movement and no hint of a destination. The horizontal display on the indicator panel betrays the elevator as a case of positive entropy. The light pro- gresses towards the number at which it will stOp: rien n'indique que la cabine de l'ascenseur aux portes fermées S'éléve, sauf les chiffres disposes sur une ligne non pas verticale mais horizontale au-dessus des deux panneaux d'acier hermétiquement joints, comme ceux d'un coffre- fort, et qui S'allument et s'éteignent 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ll 12 13 14 15 l6 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 l'un aprés l'autre. (Cc; p. 221) The narrator's achievement will be to persuade himself of his continuing verticality as he assumes a horizontal posture. The sick man falls to floor only to see the carpet 177 become erect, ”la moguette s'éléve a la verticale" (Cc; p. 225). The parallelogram of light is compressed to a verti- cle line as the woman finished her coffee. The illusion of potency appears at the moment of the narrator's figurative castration. Les Corps conducteurs is the last of Simon's novels in which phallocentrism appears with logocentrism to conceal the novel's closure. The narrator of Triptyque will not, according to Sylvére Lotringer, seek refuge in the powers of eroticism or semiosis; the spell of the body and of writing will have been broken: On pourrait maintenent se demander si, selon la formule de Bataille, la coupure bande. L'opération de suture, qfii_3?igeraitle phallus en lieu de la bzafiEE-et reformerait l'unité du texte en refermant 1a déchirure signifiante, est toutefois quasi-absente de Triptyque. The strategies of narration in La Bataille de Pharsale and Les Corps conducteurs are not markedly different in their manner of operation. The second novel, however, introduces a note of hesitancy, a narrator somewhat tenta- tive to pursue his fiction but equally reluctant to con- front it. He traverses three different cross-sections before identifying completely with the blue print. Be is unsure of himself, not knowing whether light really does enter the conference room. His reading of Poussin's paint- ing has lost the tome of optimism it had in La Bataille de Pharsale. His final words are less confident. Appearance no longer varnishes reality; the worn patterns of the carpet reveal the threads of the loom. The proximity of 178 his gaze enables him to view the carpet as worn out and obsolete; the colours are dim and old fashioned, their coordination antiquated: Les couleurs fades, passées, se fondent dans une harmonie vieillotte pour ouvrage de dames ou canevas. (Cc: p. 226) The word "canevas" has a second meaning of an outline for an artistic composition, a piece of music or a novel. The carpet is an unflattering mirror for the narrator, reflecting the archaic posture of the novel's architecture. The work artfully abandoned to its own self-composition, a pattern formed by the industry of interweaving narrative strands,is unmasked by the fading of the images, the conducting bodies. The grey uniformity of the underlying structure is revealed, affording the narrator a glimpse of the beginning and end of all novels and carpets. The narrator sees himself for a brief final moment as the ene— my, the architect of his demise, and with this gesture of lucidity a turning point is reached. NOTES Claude Simon, in Bettina Knapp, "Document: Inter- view avec Claude Simon,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 16, no. 2 (1969), p. 179-190. 2 Claude Simon, p. 183. 3 Claude Simon, in Nouveau Roman: hierL augourd'hui, 2, Pratiques (Paris: U.G.E. 10718, 1972), p. 11 . 4 Claude Simon, in Claud DuVerlie, "Interview with Claude Simon," Sub-Stance, 8 (1974) ll. 5 Claude Simon, "Interview with Claude Simon," p. 13. 6 p. 107. Claude Simon, Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd'hui, 7 Claude Simon, ”Interview with Claude Simon,” p. 17. 8 J.A.E. Loubére, ”The Generative Function of Transla- tion in the Novels of Claude Simon,” paper delivered at the annual MLA convention, section 229 (Monday, Dec. 27, 1976) p. 17. 9 Claude Simon, La Bataille de Pharsale (Paris: Minuit, 1969). p. 70. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text so, (BP). 10 Claud DuVerlie, ”Amor Interruptus: The Question of Eroticism, or, Eroticism in Question in the Works of Claude Simon,” Sub-Stance, 8 (1974), 21-33. 179 180 11 DuVerlie, p. 31. 12 DuVerlie, p. 31. 13 Gerard Genette, Figures I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 69. 14 DuVerlie, p. 30-31, quoting Claude Simon, La Route des Flandres (Paris: Seuil, 1960), p. 314, "L'incthrent, nonchalant impersonnel et destructeur travail du temps." 15 Robert Lifton, The Life of the Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), p. 39. 15 Lifton, p. 47. 17 Francois van Rossum Guyon,"Ut pictura poesis” Degrés I (1973), p. k10. 13 Lifton, p. 47. 19 Claude Simon, "Document: Interview avec Claude Simon,” p. 189. 2° Claude Simon, Les Cor s conducteurs (Paris: Minuit, 1971), p. 222. Subsequent reEerences to this work appear in the text so, (Cc). 21 René Girard, Menson e romantigue et vérité romanesque (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1961) p. 289. 22 J.A.E. Loubere, 'Viess Through the Screen: In-Site in Claude Simon,” Yale French Studies, 57, (1979) p. 36. 23 Loubére, p. 46. 181 24 Tom Bishop, 'L'image de la création chez Claude Simon," in Nouveau Roman: hier, aujourd'hui 2 Prati ues, p. 64-50 25 Sylvére Lotringer, 'Cryptique" in Claude Simon: Analyse, Théorie (Paris: U.G.E., 10/18, 1975), p. 336. CHAPTER V CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS Desire has its truth in death, not so the novel according to Girard at the time of Mensonge romantiqpe et vérité romanesque. Discontinuance of desire and of the novel coincide at the end of Les Corps conducteurs, but the narrator does not recover, a state of affairs which indicates a conclusion less succinct and self-contained than Girard's ritual of exorcism, or even that of recy- cling in La Bataille de Pharsale. Les Corps conducteurs is incomplete in at least one sense, for it leaves unre- solved the purgatorial torment which continues to afflict the authorial interlocutor of the work, as it afflicted the Roman centurion Crastinus. The final line of the novel, invoking the ”trame mise a nu,”1 permits no unambigu- ous reading of its sense, and from its privileged position in the text, heralds Triptygpe as a drama of unveiling, disrobing, and even peeling of skin from bone. The proximity of the narrator's gaze to the carpet at the conclusion of Les Corps conducteurs indicates a possi- ble interpenetration of consciousness and its object, of figural and literal readings. Paul de Man, in his analysis 182 183 of Yeat's "Among School Children” notes that the rhetorical mode of an utterance can, when undecidable, permit the copresence of incompatible senses: (...) two entirely coherent but entirely incompatible readings can be made to hinge on one line whose grammatical structure is devoid of ambiguity but whose rhetorical mode turns the mood as well as the mode of the entire poem upside down. At stake in Simon's line is not the rhetorical nature of the statement as a question, "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Unlike Yeat's last line the uncertainty proceeds from the phenomenoloqical distortion which has characterised the narrator's vision as it moves between map and territory, from blue print and cross section to lived reality. The reader remains unsure as to the distinc- tion between discovery and failure; a truth laid bare is also one worn out, devoid of further hermeneutical poten- tial. Have narrator and carpet fulfilled their useful function, satisfying the planned obsolescence of novel and furnishing, or has the reader's mind been furnished with a sense of urgency, with a desire to survive and be redeemed from the naked mortality of the novel's ending? Claude Simon, at least, seems to incline to the latter view, invoking his sense of failure as a motivation to continue writing, to conclude as it were each novel with another: En parlant de l'impression d'échec qui accompagne l'achévement d'une oeuvre, 184 j'avais a l'esprit (je l'ai dit par ailleurs) que, chaque fois, on s'apergoit qu'il y avait mieux a faire et que l'on a commis des erreurs. Par exemple, grace a celles commises dans Les Corps conducteurs, j'ai écrit Tripquue. Simon's sense of failure is not due alone to the errors he sees himself as having committed. He considers Triptyque to be the best of which he is capable in his chosen path, yet he remains curiously unsatisfied with this later work: Ce qui ne Signifie pas que je pense avoir écrit 13 1e livre parfait. A preuve, c'est que j'ai recommencé a écrire, et que le roman auquel je Sravaille en ce moment est absolument different. There would seem to be a recurrent component in Simon's later works which engenders a sense of incompletion, each novel resembling a skirmish in which tactical manoeuvres do not succeed in gaining a strategic advantage. As if in support of this contention, there reappears in Triptyqpe a circadian rhythm which serves as a backdrop to the events described. The action of the novel ceases as death or drugged sleep overtake the protagonists at the end of their waking day. The darkness which threatens the autotelic concerns of inscription and actor alike, finally engulfs the novel in a mechanical way, as consciousness retreats into its daily eclipse. Nonetheless a lesson has been gained from the conclu- sion of Les Corps conducteurs. The feeling of death asso- ciated to the moment of novelistic closure touches upon a 185 truth too unvarnished for the novel to sustain. Trippyque provides a reaction which is to focus upon the drama of coupling in human relationships and in writing. Eros is privileged by the enfolding of human affairs within in- scription, while writing undertakes a self-consciously refractory pronouncement against the absolute aegis of Thanatos. Death is to be seen as no more than an untimely obstacle in the amorous yet deadly struggle for supremacy between the two combattant forces of desire which consti- tute the divided self of the text. Lethe, the truth which encompasses desire, whether normatively teleological or schizOphrenically disjunctive, is destined to appear off stage in Tpiptyque. The narrative voice, repository of a moribund consciousness in Les Corps conducteurs, here becomes fully disembodied. Its form is systematically demonstrated as a point of view or perspective whose commentary in no way intrudes upon the action, even if the itinerary of the narrative signifier betrays a compulsive need to purge and neutralise all traces of death. The feeling of death which persists in Triptyque does not originate directly from the human subject, the narra- tor, but is organised by the logic of the story. The actual death by drowning which the reader understands to have transpired is indirectly portrayed, whereas the term drown- ing is scattered throughout the novel, affixing itself to anything save an actual fatality. There is notwithstanding 186 a clear invitation to read a drowning into the oblique and obfuscated references to an undescribed event, if not by inference, then by association, as Sylvére Lotringer suggests in the article 'Cryptique': Certaines operations laissent peu de place a la chance, c'est-a-dire a la chute, a l'inter- vention constituante, déliante-délirante, du sujet. Tout ce qui ressortit d'une certaine logique du récit regoit assez aisément son sceau d'authenticité. Ainsi la prodigieuse dispersion sur l'ensemble du roman d'un signi- fiant unique (noyer) donne a lire 1a scene occultée de la no ade nocturne: "l'ombre des quatre noyers' (p. 8, I6, 93, 104, 143, 157, 180, 221), ”son visage toujours noyé dans l'ombre' (p. 147), ses yeux aveugles de noyée” (p. 56), "1e noyé en smoking” (p. 191), ”tout est indifféremgent noyé dans la nuit opaque" (p. 206), etc. Lotringer would seem to be suggesting that the internal reduplication of the term drowning authenticates the reading of the unnarrated scene as that of the drowning of a small girl abandoned in favour of an amorous rendez- vous. Ricardou has made similar theoretical statements. In a novel where the story lines become scattered, mise-en- abyme can provide a metaphorical unity: La mise en abyme tend a restreindre l'éparpille- ment des récits fragmentairesGSelon un groupe- ment de récits métaphorigues. The paradoxical function noted by Ricardou may be taken to privilege the figural over the literal, and it is apparent that such is the project of Triptyque, where death by drowning is counterbalanced by other readings of noyer. Ricardou in a later work, ”Le Dispositif osiriaque”, 187 understands the counterpoint as that of Open ended con- flict, where the term is applied equally tO violence and lovemaking, to principles of life and death, including the Spreading of the walnut trees over the water: Puisque le conflit doit rester ouvert, 1e texte procéde a des attaques croisées: tandis que les noyers, arbres de vie, sont associés a l'eau mortelle, la noygde, signe de mort, est liée a l'acte de Vie. A difficulty arises in Ricardou's argument from the use of the word pgygg in a metaphorical and onomastic way, which would suggest less an affirmation than an evasion of the literal sign of death. Similarly it might be objected in Lotringer's reading that the drowning scene is not so much authenticated as it is redistributed by the text into areas of non-confrontation with the moment of death. How successful the attempt to neutralise the inscribed traces of death has been may be judged from the reaction of both critics, both of whom dwell upon the act of drown- ing even while refusing the participation Of the human subject. Jacques Derrida in La Carte ppstale Offers a different glimpse of self-reflexive writing, remarking upon the lack of self-sufficiency in the final chapter of Freud's Beypnd the Pleasure Principle; where the text serves as a commentary upon its own procedures it loses indepen- dency, limping to a poor conclusion. Moreover, in a pun on the word 'boite", Derrida suggests the idea of an 188 incompleteness in the framing process: Sa démarche est l'un de ses objets, d'ofi l'allure, et c'est pourquoi ga ne peut pas aller trés bien ni marcher tout seul. Un de ses objets parmi d'autres mais aussi celui pour lequel i1 y a des objets avec lesquels faire des trans- et spéculer Cet objet parmi d'autres n'est pas n'importe lequel. Alors ga boite et ca ferme mal. What emerges from the relationship of the frame to the framing in Trippyque is firstly the impossibility Of efficient packaging, Eros cannot fully contain Thanatos. Secondly, there is a breakdown in the logistical play of the text, as different utopian systems are attempted and then discarded, only to allow time to intrude its destruc- tive work upon a halting synchrony, one which can but pro- vide a lame attempt to arrest diachronic flow. The text reenters an anthrOpocentric universe and falls a prey to the human condition. The failure of Eros to secure pleasure free from orgasm is reflected both thematically and formally within the work. Sexual play is conditioned by voyeurism, it is Observed both in its activity and in its consequences. It is even initiated by the vision of its absence, existing in a dialogic environment with its thanatic corollary. Or, dans Trippygue, 1e cadavérique et le coItal, maintes fois associés, se trouvent notamment pris dans la liaison successive la plus forte: celle de l'engendrement. C'est le cadavre du sanglier qui suscite 1e colt dans la grange. En effet, c'est face a lui que la servante et 1e chasseur se donnent imperceptible- ment rendez-vous: (...) Le cadavérique se trouve ainsi incorporé au coital. Mais, réciproquement, 189 comme il convient, c'est l'accouplement dans la grange qui provoque 1e cadavre de la petite fille qui dés lors se noiera. Le coital se trouve ainsi incorporé au cadavérique. Davantage: cette premiere série se double d'une seconde, exactement conforme. C'est apres avoir regardé le cadavre du sanglier que les deux gargons en viennent a voir le colt dans la grange, et c'est pour observer cet accouplement qu'ils abandonnent a leur tour la surveillance de la fillette que leur g confié la domestique (pages 56, 218, 177, 183). . The possibility Of a retrospective synthesis such as that Offered above by Ricardou is contingent upon a recuper- ative process which overrides the temporality of the story with its flash forwards and incessant switching between the three anecdotes, of which the drowning incident is the conclusion to but one. In Le Nouveau Roman Ricardou had singled out Triptyqpe as bringing to a paroxysm the tech- nique of suspended narration. Characteristically Ricardou suggests that the narration of multiple simultaneous events, carried to its extreme, serves not to heighten but to reduce suspense, allowing the novel to become bOgged down in an internal temporal rhythm, emphasising its independence from diurnal progressions: Par cette scripturale injection de temps dans le temps, toutes scenes, si bréves soient-elles, tendent respectivement, par leur action ré- ciproque, vers une durée inadmissible. Une fois encore, par un effet de littéralité, excédant toute reduction référentielle, c'gst d'un parfait enlisement du récit qu'il s'agit. The interruptio of the text is no more effective in preventing Ricardou from resynthetizing the narrative 190 signified, than is the coitus interruptus in the barn from engendering a fatal turn of events for the little girl. Eros, once observed, reveals as ineluctably as did the paradise of Eden that which lies beyond its own limits. The orgasmic collision which cessates erotic play and imparts knowledge of mortality is already imprinted within the relation of the voyeuristic observer to the erotic Object. Observation is located in the beyond, where birth and death are not controlled by the pleasure principle. It is by looking beyond itself that the text packages ineffi- ciently, for it engages the coital and the cadaverous in a relation of reciprocral engendering, rather than containing the latter within the former. DuVerlie reinforces the position that eroticism is related to knowledge of the world, and specifically to the death instinct. He quotes John Fletcher on the homici- dal transformation of Eros into Thanatos and later states that the erotic is an instrument for knowing: (...) Eros, the life instinct, turns into Thanatos, the death instinct, or as John Fletcher points out, how Eros leads to the perpetration of a "homicidal act" (p. 140).11 It is rather curious to note that all in all Simon's very particular brand Of eroticism aims at retaining from the beginning the most univer- sal function or (Sic) eroticism, which is to be an instrument for knowing the world, a way of apprehending reality (cf. RF, 221). (D; p. 30) The drowning Of the little girl can scarcely be termed a homicidal act, although in another sequence, that of the 191 urban site, the ”visage de noyé”12 Of the young bridegroom is stained with blood from the beating he has received, "maculé de taches sombres qui s'étirent sous les narines et 1e menton” (T; p. 119). If the drowning is not explicitly homicidal, then neither can the aims of Simon's eroticism be said to reveal themselves as directed overtly towards knowledge. DuVerlie sees knowledge and the ”great life urge” (D; p. 30) subsuming coitus, and the interruptus as ironically foreshadowing man's ”ultimate expulsion from the world" (D; p. 31), by the introduction Of a principle of disjunction. TO separate the two halves of the term coitus interruptus is to introject a further interpretation, namely that eroticism is not necessarily linked to interrup- tion in Simon's work, whereas DuVerlie earlier unambiguously states the contrary, that the act of love is nearly always either interrupted by the partners themselves or by an outside agency, protagonist or narrator. The misunderstand- ing is less trivial than it appears, for it may be that the goal Of Simon's narrators' eroticism is precisely a disjunc- tion from reality, one that is paradoxically defeated by interruptio, which reasserts the primary and universal function of eroticism. Interruptio would appear to behave as DuVerlie suggests, ”interruptio, halting the vital flow, comes as a brutal cut-Off" (D; p. 30), but in fact it does not immure the couple in a garden of pleasure without consequences, it does, as earlier suggested, engage them 192 in a dialectical relationship with that which lies beyond and limits pleasure and which turns out to be the natural order, the vital flow of death and regeneration. DuVerlie is led by his reading to confuse the "great life urge" with ”eternal nature” (D; p. 30-1), and to separate both from time's destructive potential. Pleasure, however, aims toward the eternal, and orgasm towards life and death. The distinction is crucial for an analysis of different types of play within the text Of Triptyque. Dalton Krauss, in a paper entitled "Beyond the text of pleasure: Projet pour une revolution 3 New-York," follows the categories of texte de plaisir and texte de jouissance established by Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du £3553. Pleasure is described as the traditional mode of reading, in which transcendent meaning is distilled from the text. Orgasm is described as the piecemeal, irrecuper- able and intransitive condition of the modern text: ”Dis- continuity, disintegration, rupture, coupure, these are some ”13 Orgasm of the characteristic attributes of jouissance. then becomes pleasure in pieces: 'Textes de jouissance. Le plaisir en piéces la langue en pieces; la culture en "14 It is subversive to Barthes' reading of the new piéces. novel, but not to his system Of categorisation, to suggest that Trippygue observes the distinction between pleasure and orgasm, but in so doing breaks down utOpian structure; it becomes accessible as a novel which, if not to be read in a 193 traditional way, reflects at the very least concerns Of a traditional kind, those to do with the nature of love and death. Pleasure in Triptyque represents the desire to escape into closed ineffable systems of meaning through different kinds Of play, the erotic included. In each case the integrity Of the system's structure fails, and breaks down into its constituent parts. The ternary structure of Triptyque has provided a celebrated example of separable interdependency in the three story lines. Each anecdote is distinguishable from its fellows, but imprisoned within their context by its appearance within the frame Of the other story lines in the form Of a graphic representation: book, film, jigsaw, post- card or poster. The structure is not, as might appear, closed upon itself. As Simon himself reveals, a diptych would have served equally as well: Mais au départ, j'avaisseulement en téte deux series (celle de la campagne et celle de la banlieue industrielle). La-dessus, a l'automne de 1971, a eu lieu a Paris 1a grande retrospective de Francis Bacon dont non seulement la peinture m'a fortement impressionné, mais dont certaines oeuvres avaient pour titre Triptyque, titre et principe que j'ai trouvés en eux-mémes tellement excitants que j'ai decide d'adjoindre a mes deux premiéres series une troisieme, celle de la station balnéaire, ins irée d'ailleurs elle-méme par des toiles de Bacon. The third sequence, that of the seaside resort, is remarkable in that it alone contains references to charaCr ters who are drawn from Simon's affective past and who 194 reappear periodically throughout his work. The ternary form of the novel is open ended and obeys dictates beyond those of a purely formal harmony. Throughout the novel extrinsic factors intrude upon closed systems. The young schoolboy in the country creates an impossibly confused solution to a problem of geometry, whereupon a fly appears and traces a further itinerary upon the figure, ironically underlining the random element which has prevented the closed symmetry of the correct answer. Just as the geome- trical figure is complicated by the fly's contribution, the design proceeds "sans raison apparente" (T; p. 87). The fly is further associated metonymically to the clown, whose performance in the circus ring provides an atmosphere of bathos and comic relief against which the seriousness of the drowning, the disastrous marriage and adolescent drug dealing are to be measured and found want- ing. The clown, like the fly, is "a peu prés au centre" (T; p. 87) not only of his ring but of the events of the novel. The futility of the clown's behaviour mimics that of the fly in allegorising the breakdown of meaningful communication and final solutions. Of the various puzzles which populate Triptyque and might be said to reflect or command the unfolding of the narrative, Lotringer selects three for consideration in his article ”Cryptique' as representative of the play of the narration. Of the three Lotringer discards two as spurious, 195 the film fragments and the jigsaw puzzle, and selects the juxtapositions Of the film and circus posters as a minia- turisation of a Derridean system of play within the text. Problems are raised by privileging one mise en abyme over its fellows in Lotringer's analysis. The Objection might run thus: Lotringer locates a seminal model in the mise en gpygg constituted by the posters and describes with its help a hierarchisation of the sequence of the disastrous wedding over the other two sub-narratives. The wedding series does not provide a centre, but an absence thereof for the novel, for it can find no mise en apyme to represent itself and only itself. Unlike the puzzle which reflects the countryside scenes, and the film fragments which are arranged into the seaside sequence, the posters always interact in tandem, never presenting the wedding in the urban site by itself. But if the wedding panel of the triptych results from the wedding of the other two panels in the posters, does this not confer upon the posters a hermeneutic function which Lotringer denies to the mise en abype by definition? Le volet nuptial résulte des noces des deux autres battants, ou encore: chacun d'eux en prOpose l'amorce et la réplique.16 La seule clOture qui intervienne, a prOprement parler, dans le livre, c'est donc celle de la representation. De la representation représentée. Le puzzle ne représentait que la feinte d'une presence, la Simulation d'un secret. Just as the disastrous wedding is an absence of centre 196 so the jigsaw puzzle is essentially absent, "la feinte d'unaprésence". The jigsaw puzzle is taken at this moment in Lotringer's argument to be paradigmatic of the mise en gpygg, conveniently overlooking the specialised transcen- dental role of the posters. It is perhaps ironic that a critique of Lotringer's Derridean reading should be marshalled to demonstrate another of Derrida's precepts, ”ca boite et ga ferme mal". In Lotringer's complex reading of Triptyque, mise en apyme, which Lotringer takes to be any kind of internal reduplication, provides a texte de plaisir, a transcendental recuperation which is shown to be counter- feit and in its exposure to reinforce the overall strategy of Triptyque as that of a texte de jouissance: Mise en abyme fidele d'une histoire particuliére, 1e classement (du dispositif filmique) propose un modéle d'intégration logique tout aussi con- traire a la proliferation tefguelle que l'est 1e mode téléologique du puzzle. It is unfortunate that Lotringer should proceed by creating a texte depplaisir from the posters which is not taken to be counterfeit. The Derridean system of play which he outlines is derived from a non-Derridean reduplication, for the posters represent but do not function as a model of absence, they are not misleading but are central. The implications of such a reading of the posters are catas- trophic for they identify the Derridean superstructure of Triptyque as a utopist fantasy of pleasure, and quite the reverse of what Lotringer had intended. 197 Lotringer's position that mise en abyme constitutes a ”feinte de la presence" may now be granted, with the understanding that his reading is no less counterfeit. A text incapable of sustaining its own fantasies, basing them in contradiction is one traumatised by the desire for closed systems yet unable to complete them. DuVerlie pro- vides a penetrating insight into the interruptio which permeates the workings of the text of Triptyque when he isolates anxiety neurosis as an accompaniment to coitus interruptus: Psychoanalysts have never stopped bringing to our attention the danger of practices such as coitus interruptus, which is generally accom— panied by an anxiety neurosis. (D; p. 31) The anxiety at work in Simon's novels has earlier been identified as death anxiety, leading to schizophrenic disjunction. The final pages of Triptyque reenter time as the synchronic representation afforded by the jigsaw puzzle in its completed form is swept away by the Englishman Brown. He presides anthropogentrically over his creation, which awaits his final gesture. The puzzle, like the spec- tators in the cinema, is in a state of diachronic suspense, ”pressentant l'imminence de la fin". The exodus of the cinemagoers, hard upon the destruction of the puzzle, leaves the streets empty of all save the wedding vehicle, whose deserted condition marks the interruption Of marital eroticism as surely as the deserted streets signify the 198 conclusion of the waking day. On entend claquer les portieres de quelques voitures qui démarrent l'une aprés l'autre. Finalement une seule, dont les poignées sont décorées de noeuds de tulle détrempés par la pluie, reste contre le trottoir oppose, un peu plus haut que le cinema dont les lumiéres ex- térieures s'éteignent tandis que les ouvreuses tirent les grilles et que les derniers spectateurs s'éloignent par petits groupes, les cols des manteaux relevés, courbant 1e dos contre le vent, sur les trottoirs bientdt deserts. (T; p. 225) The Spectators appear disconcerted on leaving the cinema, ”comme des gens qui se réveillent d'un lourd sommeil.” As they make their way off they become momentar- ily subjected to the work of the wind, as though they briefly encounter the hostile forces of the waking world. Mention of the wind at this point in the text refers the reader intertextually to that other work of Simon which deals with the ternary form of the triptych, Le Vent, subtitled Tentative de restitution d'un retable baroque. Le Vent concludes with the notion of a wind condemned to the eternal suffering of immortality: Bientdt i1 soufflerait de nouveau en tempéte sur la plaine, finissant d'arracher les dernieres feuilles rouges des vignes, achevant de dépouiller les arbres courbés sous lui, force déchainée, sans but, condamnéeas'épuiser sans fin, sans espoir de fin, gémissant la nuit en une longue plainte, comme si elle se lamentait, enviait aux hommes endormis, aux créatures passagéres et périssables leur posiibilité d'oubli, de paix: 1e privilege de mourir. 9 The wind brings death by stripping leaves from the trees, a purveyor of that which is denied to it. The spectators protect themselves from such a wind in Triptyque, 199 from the waking interval between two periods of sleep as they hurry, one assumes from the lateness of the hour, home to bed. The action of the wind is mirrored by that of the old woman, symbolically representing Anubis, the eater of the dead, as she plucks the unseeing eye from the rabbit prior to skinning it: la vieille 3 téte de chien arrache d'un geste rapide du poignet l'un des yeux du lapin. (T; p. 30) Elle jette alors dans l'herbe le couteau ensanglanté et entreprend de dépouiller 1e lapin de sa peau en le retournant, un peu comme on retire une chaussette. (T; p. 38) The skinned rabbit in the country sequence resembles the actress in the seaside episode. Together they mark a transition from the "mise a nu" of Les Corps conducteurs: Ils se dirigent vers une table d'opération sur laquelle est allongée une jeune femme nue. (Cc; p. 8) ' La moitié du corps du lapin est maintenant a nu. Les muscles roses des cuisses, des fesses et du ventre apparaissent comme sur une planche d'anatomie. (T; p. 38) 1e corps écartelé, trop rose par endroits, plus que nu lui aussi, vulnerable, comme le corps d'un animal écorché. (T; p. 50) Triptyque is less concerned with the cross-sectional possibilities of anatomy and concentrates upon the process of stripping away protective layers. The actress, as Simon remarks, has, “une sensibilité d'écorché!20 Her irritability is controlled by a drug dependency which allows a thanatoid Oblivion as She drifts into comatose sleep, her eyes staring 200 vacantly. The spectators who leave their cinematic sleep likewise have their frail protection against the buffeting Of the wind, donning their coats for the trip between the cinema and other shelter. The circadian rhythms of everyday life present a threat in their diurnal phase, where wakeful- ness causes the feeling of death to impinge. Death repre- sents no more than definitive sleep; the wind of conscious- ness brings with it the unceasing torment that is identified with the fate of Crastinus in La Bataille de Pharsale. The progression from the hollow self-deception prac- tised by the narrator of Les Corps conducteurs to the pre- occupation with laying bare in Triptyque is suggestive of a qualitative change in the purgatorial process. The inter- penetration of literary veiling and unveiling is now less than ineluctable. Utopian systems are readily assumed by the text, but more willingly discarded, permitting a play, in the sense of a less than perfect fit, between one solu- tion and the next. The figure of an authorial interlocutor is outlined by the interstitial Space, and a dialogue estab- lished between utopian practice and the anxiety which sub- tends it. The dramatisation of the wind allegorises the unspoken discourse of the interlocutor as an urgent questing force. The wind is left on stage at the close of the novel, lending a sense of incompletion to the story- telling as the dancer seeks to separate himself from the dance.. The narrator begins to participate in the increased 201 self-consciousness of the novel by taking into account the relative, localised nature of his own concerns. The novel begins to focus upon a sense of dissatisfaction, which can only be glimpsed by the narrator as that which is missing from, and therefore paradoxically threatening to his own designs. The narrator cannot shut out the watcher of his fictional dance, nor the efforts of the onlooker, the inter- locutor, to dissociate himself from the choreography for which he is responsible, and in which he also dances as narrator. For in Yeat's final line the dancer and the dance appear as one, making it desperately easy for the commentator to be swept along. The ease provides a sense of well-being born of vicarious participation, but a sense of desperation at being powerless to do otherwise. The illusion of the dance is in this last respect akin to the dizzying whirlpool which engulfs Ulysses and his ship as the island of Purgatory hoves into view in Dante's Inferno. Ulysses is no penitent and has no right to the gift of redemption. Similarly the interlocutor must distance him- self from his fiction, or be denied the fully redemptive truth of the novel: Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornO in pianto; ché della nova terra un turbo nacque, e percosse del legno i1 primo canto. Tre volte i1 fé girar con tutte l'acque: alla quarta levar la poppa in suso e la prora ire in gul, com'altrui piasgue, infin che'l mar u sopra nOl richiuso. The image of drowning which invades Triptyque 202 threatens not only the deserted child, but writing itself. The fiction which metes out death will in turn surrender to the ink that is night, finding its own truth in death, as the opaque waters close over the description. Darkness brings a metaphorical saturation of the creative process. 11 n'y a plus ni bois, ni hameau, ni champs, ni pres: tout est indifféremment noye dans la nuit Opaque. (...) La terre, 1e monde entier semblent engloutis sous une couche d'encre épaisse, palpable. (T; p. 206, my brackets) At the end of the novel completion of the jigsaw puzzle reaffirms the fate of the textual description. The jigsaw assumes the dimensions of the riverside scene, obturating the lacquered blackness which had delineated the incomplete areas Of the puzzle: L'homme 3 la stature puissante mais alourdie place de sa main droite 1a derniére petite piéce, et le dernier ilot de laque noire diSparaIt, obturé par une partie de la chevelure de l'un des garcons. (T: p. 223) Brown's final gesture will be to sweep the pieces away, destroying the symmetrically inverse proportion of the puzzle to the table-top. The Englishman's compulsive reaction to the ending of the puzzle is destructive only of the localised solution to his impatience with waiting. The puzzle is no ultimate arbiter of Brown's difficulties with the actress, and forms part of a wider conflict, as yet unresolved. The puzzle is scattered on the floor, restoring the table-top to a uniform blackness that bears no trace of the recent superimposition, just as day is 203 obliterated by night. The green of the puzzle against the red of the carpet reintroduces the colour juxtaposition symbolic of erotic or warlike struggle throughout Simon's work. The puzzle no longer exists as such, for it has lost its frame and none of its disseminated pieces bears any complete image. It now belongs to a wider network of interrelationships: Leurs découpures méandreuses ont été calculées de fagon qu'aucune d'entre elles, prises isolé- ment, n'offre l'image entiere d'un personnage, d'un animal, d'un visage méme. A part de tres rares exceptions (l'ocre de la robe des vaches, 1e gris des pierres du pont, le brun violacé des toits) leur ensemble présente toute la gamme variée des verts (émeraude, vert bronze, vert pomme, jade, perse, olive) et elles forment comme un archipel de petites iles creusées de baies, de golfes, hérissées de caps, sur 1e fond rouge de la moguette. (T; p. 223) The interplay between regional and general concerns represented in the puzzle mirrors in microcosm the ending of the novel, where the self-obliteration of the fiction refers the reader to a pervasive feeling of concern as yet unstated. The circadian machinery of a principle extrinsic to the novel guarantees an end of sorts. Brown's action restores darkness to the space occupied by the puzzle. It is the perfunctory and mechanical intervention of a deus ex machina which announces the same phenomenon of intervention on the global scale of the novel. The abruptness of the novel's conclusion conditions the paradoxical relation of 204 despair to presumption in the purgatorial experience of the interlocutor. His fiction is damned but he has not been saved, and it is beginning to appear as though he is obey- ing a confessional obsession which is distinct from the purging experience of the true penitent. The conclusion is forced rather than naturally entrOpic, a drugged sleep artificially induced, as in the case of the actress and that of the bridegroom. The distinction made possible between redemptive and contrived closure derives from the space Of play in the novel, invading the street as an area of tension as yet inarticulate and deserted. The authorial interlocutor's condition has deteriorated to the point where he must do violence to the text, forcing it to make his absence maxi- mally visible as a wind of night tugging at the characters. His sense of organic incompletion and alienation paves the way for ngon de choses, a text which deems itself remark- able not for what it portrays, but for what it leaves out: I1 n'a pas non plus été fait mention des bruits ou du silence, ni des odeurs (poudre, sang, rat crevé, ou Simplement cette senteur subtile, moribonde et rance de la poussiére) qui regnenS2 ou sont perceptibles dans le local, etc., etc. The beginning of ngon'de chosss presents Striking affinities with the puzzle's final disposition on the carpet in Triptyque, the decaying room is marked by the interplay of shades of red and green, ”des tons ocre-vert et rougeatres (vermillon passé)" (Lc; p. 10), and by a 205 pattern of plaster islands.”l'archipel crayeux des morceaux de platre se répartit en Ilots d'inégales grandeurs" (Lc; p. 10). It would appear that Simon's project in Legon de choses is not as different as he would have it from that of Tripquue. In order to comprehend the change in the authorial interlocutor which has occurred in Triptyque and reaches its fullest dramatisation in Legon de choses a further investigation of the universe of paradox is pro- posed. The interlocutor becomes threatened by his perver- sion Of the purgatorial process, as his death anxiety causes him to revolt against the prOSpect of entropy. NOTES 1 Claude Simon, Les Cor s conducteurs (Paris: Minuit, 1971), p. 226. Subsequent re erences to this work appear in the text so, (Cc). 2 Josue Harrari, ed., Textual Strategies (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 131. 3 Claude Simon: Analyse, Théorie, Proc. of the Colloque de Cerisy, 1-8 Jul. 1974 (Paris: U.G.E., 10/18, E75) , p. 424. 4 Claude Simon: AnalyseLAThéorie, p. 424. 5 Sylvére Lotringer, ”Cryptique”, in Claude Simon: Analyse, Theorie, p. 325. 6 p. 75. Jean Ricardou, Le Nouveau Roman (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 7 Jean Ricardou, "Le DiSpositif osiriaque", Etudes littéraires, 9, no. 1 (1976), 78. 8 Jacques Derrida, La Carte_postale (Paris: Flammar- ion, 1980), p. 418. 9 Jean Ricardou, "Le Dispositif osiriaque", p. 76. 10 Jean Ricardou, Le Nouveau Roman, p. 135. 11 Claud DuVerlie, 'Amor Interruptus: The Question of Eroticism, or, Eroticism in Question in the Works of Claude Simon," Sub-Stance, 8 (1974), 28. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text so, (D). 206 207 12 Claude Simon, Trippyque (Paris: Minuit, 1973), p. 191. Subsequent references to this work appear in the text so, (T). 13 Dalton Krauss, ”Beyond the Text of Pleasure: Projet pour une revolution 3 New York.” paper delivered at the annual MLA convention, seminar Robbe-Grillet (1975). p. 3. 14 Roland Barthes, 9e Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973) p. 83. Quoted in Krauss p. 3. 15 Claude Simon: Analyse, Théorie, p. 425. 16 Sylvére Lotringer, p. 320. 17 Sylvere Lotringer, p. 332. 18 Sylvére Lotringer, p. 317. 19 Claude Simon, Le Vent (Paris: Minuit, 1957), p. 24L 20 Claude Simon: Analyse, Théorie, p. 425. 21 Dante Alighieri, Inferno (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1977) p. 327. 22 Claude Simon, Legpn de choses (Paris: Minuit, 1975) p. 11. Subsequent references to thiS work appear in the text so, (Lc). CHAPTER VI SHORT-CIRCUITRY The logic Of closure which Operates in works prior to Triptyque becomes disfunctional in the latter novel. That Triptyque is not a closed text in the sense of its predecessors should not be taken to mean that it has in some way defied the tradition of the novel, but simply that the reader is left without the comfortable illusion of self—sufficiency that lies in the framing of answers rather than questions. The fragmentation of utopias of language is suggestive of a failure on the part of the interlocutor to integrate his predicament into a properly purgatorial environment. Legon de choses will mark the end Of a period of adventurisnon the part Of the authorial interlocutor, or at least such is the hypothesis of the present reading, for with the conclusion of Legon de choses an impasse is reached in the postulation Of an 'aventure d'une écriture' to supersede the 'écriture d'une aven- ture'.1 Certain textual strategies are by definition self-de- feating, according to Julia Kristeva in her article, "Le texte clos". Into this category fall concepts that deal with arbitrariness in writing: 208 209 11 est évident que les concepts d'"arbitraire" et de "littéralité" ne peuvent étre pensés que dans une idéOlogie de valorisation de l'oeuvre (phonétique, discursive) au detriment de l'écriture (de la productivité textuelle), autre- ment dit, dans un texte (culturel) clos.2 La Bataille de Pharsale provides a classic example of the bad faith which seeks to convert closure into open- endedness; it introduces an example of writing at its con— clusion: "O. écrit: jaune et puis noir temps d'un batte- ment de paupiéres et puis jaune de nouveau."3 The re— petition Of the novel's Opening line seeks to create a cir— cularity which circumvents finality: L'intervention de l'instance de l'écriture dans le texte est souvent l'excuse que l'auteur se donne pour justifier 1a fin arbitraire de son récit.4 The doubling of the narrator is a comfortable excuse in La Bataille de Pharsale, for the fiction is not threat- ened by its inner contradiction and can present a front Of arbitrary writing. Arbitrariness often masks a structural completeness which underlies the compositional arrest of the novel. Les Corps conducteurs terminates with an inter- penetration Of narrator and thread bare carpet according to a principle of conduction which transposes life and text. The ending of the novel has been taken at face value by critics such as Bishop as a convenient place to stop an iongoing series. Kristeva argues that even an apparently defective ending underlines the structural wholeness of a novel, a reading that penetrates behind the facade of writ- ing by taking it as evidence of closure: 210 L'achévement explicite peut souvent manquer au texte romanesque, ou étre ambigu, ou sous-en- tendu. Cet inachevement ne souligne pas moins la finition structurale du texte.5 Triptyque Observes a more complex pattern Of narra- tive development than its predecessors, for it ends upon an intimation of self-negation. Legon de choses in turn will centre upon a rhetoric of self-contestation and can- cellation, dramtiSing arbitrariness by a display of its own short-circuitry. A typology of textual behaviour organised in Kristeva's Pour une sémiologie des para- grammes, Outlines a category of writing which broadly corresponds to the practice Of Legon de choses: La pratique sémiotique de l'écriture. Nous l'appellerons dialogique Ou paragrammatique. Ici le signe est éliminé par la séquence paragrammatique correlative qui est double et zéro. On pourrait représenter cette sequence comme un tétralemme: chaque signe a un denotatum; chaque signe n'a pas de denotatum; chaque signe a et n'a pas de denotatum; il n'est pas vrai que chaque signe a et n'a pas de déno- tatum. (...) L'écriture qui a l'audace de suivre 1e trajet complet.de ce mouvementdialogxmme que nous venons de représenter par le tétralémme, donc d'étre une description et une negation successive du texte qui se fait dans le texte qui s'écrit, (...)6 At its Opening Legon cle choses presents the denotatum of a room made visible by a light bulb. The possibility of a second light source, as yet only hypothesised, casts into 'doubt the initial denotatum, since the second, more power- ful light would present the room in another aspect. The first term of the tetralemma flickers against the prOSpect of its negation as that which has not been described is presented 211 in order to demonstrate the provisional nature Of the preceding description. The narrative sign is con- tested in its semblance of wholeness, reflecting the third term of the tetralemma: La description (la composition) pept se continuer (ou étre complétée) a pen prgs indéfiniment selon 1a minutie apportée a son execution, l'entralne- ment des métaphores proposées, l'addition d'autres objets visiblesdans leur entier ou fra- gmentés par l'usure, le temps, un choc (soit en- core qu'ils n'apparaissent qu'en partie dans le cadre du tableau), sans compter les diverses hypothéses que peut susciter 1e Spectacle. Ainsi i1 n'a pas été dit si (peut-étre par une porte ouverte sur un corridor ou une autre piece) une secondeampoule plus forte n'éclaire pas la SCEne.7 The second and fourth terms of the tetralemma are en- sconced in the novel's last chapter, "Courts-circuits", where the gates the troducing the final the first light of "une seconde ampoule, plus forte" ne- denotatum of the room as first described by in- supplementary, more forceful considerations. If chapter vindicates the previous contradiction of term of the tetralemma, then it also negates the third. The alternative light source assumes responsiblity for the denotatum of the room, quelling doubt as to whether there is or is not a denotatum. The tetralemmatic struc- ture introduces moreover the figure of the double, as the second light supplants the first, and in so doing creates a Short circuit. The tetralemma is returned to its first term, but The novel hazards. the denotatum Of the room is no longer identical. closes upon a note of warning against lighting 212 Pour y voir plus clair l'une des femmes tourne le commutateur qu'elkareferme précipitamment lorsqu'elle lit sur le panneau de la porte l'avertissement tracé par le contremaitre a l'aide d'un fragment de platre, mettant en garde contre les risques de court-circuit. (Lc; p.182). The narration of Legon de Choses comes full circle with the intention of discountenancing any readings based on a hierarchisation of world over word, and of word over word. The first category, realism, is rejected in a by now familiar manner of description. The events which are narrated within the novel appear to derive from texts con- tained within it, of which the traditional "LECONS DE CHOSES" (Lc; p.23) is the most striking example. The well— known French primer of the world about us replicates the events of the novel, pluralising, categorising and reducing them to easily assimilable chunks of information suitable for schoolchildren. The reader is referred to textual sources and not to the real world in his attempt to de— cipher the novel. A second type of decoding is likewise eschewed by the novel, that of assigning generative powers to any specific section of the novel. The language of "Générique" is short-circuited by that Of "Courts- circuits"; the reader's attempt to discern a linear de- velopment is frustrated as the novel exposes the illusion 'that certain words, phrases and passages generate others. Frangois Jost, in his article, "Les Aventures du lecteur", goes beyond Barthes' "effet de réel" to demonstrate an "effet de production"8 in Simon's novels. A system of 213 generators is put into place, but is not allowed to per- . sist. Unlike the realistic Objects analysed by Barthes, the narrative signifiers are not left in place but are exploded as myth, allowing competing systems of signifi- cation to vie for supremacy. The tetralemma would seem to achieve a text governed by arbitrary and self-defeat- ing systems, a utopia Of language founded upon regenera- tive self-cancellation. But the novel,while exposing different strategies of reading as fraudulent, cannot re- sist proposing its own key in the final lines, as one Of the woman reads and reacts to the written warning couched in a medium extracted from the room itself, a door panel and a piece Of plaster. It is a text which stabilises in monologue its dialogic environment. Writing which takes itself for its own example is both allegorical and displaced, for it recuperates trans- cendent meaning by virtue of a self-interruptory process. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her article "Thoughts on the Principle of Allegory", notes the inclusion of allegoric passages in the fragment, "Propriétés des rectangles", which was later to be fleshed out into Egg Corps conducteurs. Her Observation, although couched in a futile generalisation about the novel tradition is pene- 'trating in that it sees through the purportedly anti- allegorical effects Of Simon's writing: In the good old days men read allegory with the help of a system of signification that they re- ceived from outside. In the "Propriétés" the 214 terms for decoding the allegoric passages is (sic) provided by the movement of the style itself.9 Spivak refines her insight further in the direction of identifying a subjective principle in the discourse of allegory. The style may in turn become a referent for paradigmatic self-reflection, which arrests the forward progress of the narration: Whether he (Claude Simon) likes it or not, writing such as this, because it is impossible without the presence of an extremely active creative mind behind it, may lead to an allegory of the creative process, a naming of the abyss of subjectivity, as much as committed subjecti- vist writing like Rilke's might.10 "Générique", the introductory section to Legon de choses was originally submitted as a short piece ordered by Maeght, and employed the technique of allegory in a manner analogous to that noted by Spivak in "PrOpriétés". The description is truncated by the prospect of its own interminability. La description (la composition) peut se con- tinuer (ou étre complétée) a pen pres in- définiment. (Lc; p.10) "Générique" was, of course, later incorporated and expanded, hence the Opening sections, "Générique" and "Expansion", into Legon de choses. Allegory ceased to function here as a definitive displacement Of the narrative into the abyss of subjectivity and became merely interrup- tomy. The same cannot be said of the cautionary reference txa short circuits which concludes the novel and forms a (Karollary to "Générique". The admonition which allegorises 215 the subversive conduct(ion) Of the last section comes too late, it not only displaces the narrative from the horizontal to the verticality of the subjective, it has the last word in another sense; it decodes a posteriori the tetralemmatic itinerary of the novel for the reader. In a largely unsatisfactory way the final sentence illus- trates the tetralemmatic principle of the novel, charac- terised by Kristeva as, "une voie (une trajectoire com- 11 a description which will now pléte) 5532 (qui se nieh" fit the short circuit imperfectly. An allegory which Contains, as Spivak indicates, its own terms for self- decoding, carries with it a superstructure, "the sentence becomes a metasemantic sign for which the referent is the style itself."12 A metasystem of intelligibility reintro— duces the problematic of the relationship Of the frame to the framed encountered in the previous chapter. An explan— tion of the novel's Operation cannot be completely inte- grated to the workings of the tetralemma; it belongs to the domain of commentary, being a rudimentary blueprint or "Legon de choses". As such it is both extrinsic to the novel and part of it. The framing of the novel's short circuitry may be said to be unsatisfactory because of the implications of risk involved. The short circuit is not 'generally understood as a stable configuration, as might ordinarily be argued for the tetralemma, which migrates from its originary contradiction into considerations of truth, "il n'est pas vrai que (...)". The base of the 216 tetralemma, its first two terms, always remains intact, a short circuit commonly threatens the integrity of the entire system, leaving no trace of the complete trajectory, "trajectoire complete" of the original circuitry. It is the spectre of self-destruction rather than mere negation which is conjured by the final line of the novel. The lights are turned Off by one of the women but not because the two lights are in competition, which is the sense intended by the narrator. The title of the final section "Courts circuits" refers not to the risk of fire, but to the neutralisation of what has been said by what has remained unstated, the intrusion Of a second more powerful source of light upon the events narrated. The framing of the novel's workings by the mason's writing refers ex- plicitly to the danger of an electrical fire. The decoding of allegory inscribes the novel within a frame of com- bustion. The utopic concept of perfect self-containment and sufficiency provided by the tetralemma is threatened by a principle Of auto—ignition, one which will close the no- vel and consume the narrator. Certain details of the myth of the phoenix, or its prototype the bennu present striking affinities to the allegory of the creative process in Simon's novels, and to rhis reading of Poussin's ”Orion aveugle". The heliotrOpic prOgress of Orion, referred to in an earlier chapter, finds its extreme utterance in the fate of the phoenix, which in the Book of the Dead appears as a symbol of the rising sun 217 itself, and in the Physiologus is regenerated by first burning to ashes upon the altar of the temple at Helio- polis. Legon de choses is evocative of such a dramatic example of spontaneous immolation at dusk by virtue of the extreme violence done to itself. Textual utOpia is converted by its allegorical frame into the closure of a self-consuming artefact. The sense of incompletion sti- mulated by the prospect of a novel ending despite itself paves the way for a future novel. A sequel to the pre- vious sequel will perpetuate the quest motif. Legon de choses carries to its uttermost articula- tion the paradoxical confinement Of the narrator in a text which will always escape his own efforts to contain it. For if a text is both logocentric and anthrOpocentric then the narrator of Simon's novels seeks to weave a utopic fiction of language from a material ill suited to his task, the order of the body is not designed for immobilisation. Irene Tschinka in a communication more prose poem than criticism, and at times self-parodic in its undecidability, does encapsulate quite neatly the fate Of writing in Triptyque. It is a condition created by a narrator intent upon parricide, but unequipped for the task of suppressing the contextual figure which has spawned him. The narrator chases more and more furiously in pursuit of horizons which will forever elude him: Ce qui marque l'ordre du corps dont il est a la fois le texte, 1a texture, et le prétexte, l'excédent, n'est en effet que le déplacement 218 d'une problématique archaique, a savoir celle de la limite: 1e corps étant par rapport a la "chose" ce qui disposerait d'une limite mobile, échappant par 13 a toute entreprise totalisatrice de delimita- tion. Meme lorsque l'écriture semble avoir fait le tour du corps, i1 y a toujours du corps qui reste, du corps conducteur, de l'or liquide pour revenir sur du corps, pour assurer la remise en marche de la machine apres son emballement.l3 The figure of an authorial interlocutor construed qua limit has been touched upon in the introduction of the present work. Legon de choses presents a second and related feature of the paradoxical condition of a narrative fiction, namely the fall Of the narrator. As the novel approaches final entropy or heat death, the narrator is revealed to be engaged upon a frenetic even paroxysmic activity as his tired fiction is eventually exhausted. Legon de choses ends upon the vital tones of conflagration, at odds with the extinction of the light by one of the wo- men. The sentence is convoluted so that the order of events, first reading the notice, second turning out the light, is reversed, valorising the element of risk remarked hitherto. The inversion may be contrasted with the sen— tence which completes the preceding section, "La Charge de Reichshoffen": "Tout est completement noir" (Lc; p.173k Total obscurity guarantees the blurring of distinction (between the narrator's self and the environment that he can never quite control. It is an Oblivion which permits tem- porary respite. The interlocution which results from the exchange between narrator and context.is muted, en sourdine, 219 to supply a short-lived illusion of redemptiorlwhich in- terrupts periods of textual suffering. SchOpenhauer used music rather than literature to arrive at a similar under- standing: Now the nature Of man consists in this, that his will strives, is satisfied and strives anew, and so on for ever. Indeed his happiness and well- being consist simply in the quick transition from wish to satisfaction, and from satisfaction to a new wish. For the absence of satisfaction is suffering, the empty longing for a new wish, languor, ennui.l4 Legon de choses attempts to prepare a formula for satisfaction, an alchemy of the word which will transform day into night and suffering into Oblivion. The narrator, unable to control his fiction, will attempt to manipulate his own destiny, striving to end the novel before it can complete its entire itinerary of allotted woe. Despair yields to anticipation as the narrator abdicates from his proper rOle and invests desire in his double, an under- ground figure who substitutesa.demonic conclusion for the narrator's failing angelic condition as the inhabitant of a textual paradise primed for his fall. The potential for voyeuristic imitation had previously appeared in Triptyque. One of the two boys spying upon the couple in the barn engages upon an onanistic reduplication ‘Of their activity: Le main de l'un des gargons enfouie jusqu'au poignet sous la ceinture de sa culotte, allant et venant rapidement.15 The violence of Simon's writing is evidenced, as 220 Raymond Jean has remarked, by his indiscretion and pre- cision in the description of erotic scenes: On se demande parfois quel regard de voyeur pourrait arriver a voir les choses écrites avec autant de violente indiscretion et de violente précision.16 In turning against the balance of Legon de choses, "Courts circuits" dramatises a textual voyeurism both imitative and violent. "Générique" is Open to a mimetic rewriting by a second narrator, for it contains the de- formed shadow Of an onlooker whose presence might be sur— mised from the hypothesis of a second light source: Ce qui expliquerait 1a presence d'ombres portées tres Opaques (presque noires) qui s'allongent sur le carrelage a partir des objets visibles (décrits) ou invisibles - et peut-étre aussi celle, échassiere et distendue, d'un personnage qui se tient debout dans l'encadrement de la porte. (Lc; p.11) A violent attack will be launched on this figure in "Expansion", as an enemy shell explodes behind a soldier entering the room: Un soldat se précipite dans la piéce par la porte ouverte et au moment ofi l'obus éclate il se trouve debout dans l'encadrement de celle-ci, les deux bras levés, les deux pieds a quelques centimetres du sol, comme suspendu en l'air. Un instant, la lueur de l'explosion (ou celle du soleil qui decline) (---L(lci p.24) The second figure, unlike the soldier who represents him, gains in force as he is elevated to the rOle of ad- versary. The mention of the setting sun prefigures the dramatic change which will occur in the narrator. The transformative powers Of evening, announced by a reference 221 to Monet's Effet du Soir, are brought to a culmination by the mise en abyme of the narrator in the description of a crepuscular figure depicted upon a soot-encrusted fireback: Indifférente et futile dans le parc obscur et ratissé, la jeune femme noircie par les flammes semble suspendue immobile, sans toucher terre, effleurant 1e sol de son ample jupe aérienne, estompée par les couches de suie, comme l'habitante ignifugée et paradoxale d'un monde souterrain, charbonneux et fleuri. (LC; p.110) The doubling Of the image serves to transform flames into flowers, although the young woman by the same token becomes a creature of the underground. The narrator Of "Courts circuits" is not averse to the risk of fire, pre— ferring it to day, but his activity is that Of the under- ground creature, for he inhabits the realm of hallucinatory clarity and paradox. He does violence to the linear pro- gress of the narration, undermining it with phantasms of the unspoken. As the young woman turns out the light, the novel's world appears "charbonneux et fleuri", darkly illu- minated by the chance of a short circuit. The young woman is represented in a picture of spring, but the title is incomplete, its centre illegible, "d'un cOté les lettres F,R et 0, puis L,I,N et G." De3pite the 'violence done to the illustration by the fire, the scene holds out a message Of hope, explicitly allegorical for the narrator viewing the engraving: Au milieu des gravats, l'aérienne jardiniére a 222 la robe de suie, sa serpette, son bouquet, la balustrade, le géométrique bassin d'eau noire, l'oiseau noir, le baldaquin de nuages noirs, semblent constituer quelque Optimiste et para- doxale allégorie apparaissant au coeur de l'hiver a la tremblante lueur des flammes comme une pro- messe d'espoir. (Lc; p.162) The translation of such a begrimed figure into a fig- ure Of hope is a clear invitation to read into the narrator's perception an exchange of black for white. Such Speculation is Shortly confirmed as the couple making adul- terous love achieve orgasm, and the narrator's voyeuristic eye has penetrated into the tunnel of the vagina, visuali- sing ejaculation of black semen: Tandis qu'a l'intérieur de la chaire obscure 1e long membre raidi se tend encore, lachant de longues giclées de sperme noir. (Lc; p.163) A note of violence is again apparent in that the male has failed to Observe the woman's express demand that he be careful to practice interruptus. The violence is allegori— cally significant as a rage directed at the narrator's own perception of the world as real. Orgasm is crepuscular and so hallucinatory, permitting, like the anger of the 'pourvoyeur', a visual exchange Of day and night, reality and unreality: Dans le silence de la piece qui s'assombrit peu a peu, elle (la voix du pourvoyeur) semble, avec les repetitions monotones des memes jurons, sa rage impuissante, ses brefs éclats, comme quelque chose de crépusculaire, d'irréel. (Lc; p. 54, my brackets) The work of Rene Girard and Gregory Bateson has help- ed tO organise categories and developmental stages within 223 the frame of mimetic desire. Girard, in a chapter from La Violence et le sacre entitled "Du Desir mimetique au double monstrueux", identifies violence as the product of rivalry in desire. Rivalry is no accident, but is induced by mimesis, "Le sujet desire l'objet parce que le rival lui-meme 1e desire."l7 Imitation generates conflict be- cause the object of desire is singular, whereas the sub- ject is double, conflict under such conditions is ineluct- able: "Deux desirs qui convergent sur le meme objet se font mutuellement Obstacle. Toute mimesis portant sur le desir 18 debouche automatiquement le conflit". An unresolved con- flict, Girard hypothesises, leads to the appearance of a monstrous double: Sous le terme de double monstrueux,.nous rangeons tous lesphenomenes d‘hallucination provoques par la reciprocite meconnue, au paroxysme de la crise. Le double monstrueux surgit 13 Oh se trouvaient dans les etapes precedentes un "Autre" et un "Moi" toujours separes par la difference oscillante.19 Desire divided against itself sets up an oscillation between triumph and defeat, divinity and nothingness, it is therefore attracted to and seeks to embody the violence of victory. Girard speaks of the situation as reflecting the impasse of what Bateson has christened the double bind. The narrator of Simon's novel finds himself in such a pre- dicament, for he desires to recreate himself as a sube terranean, paradoxical creature of hOpe. To do SO he must confront the obstacle of his waking self in order to wrest control of his destiny from the dimension of real 224 perception and invest it in the demonic realm of the oneiric. The attainment of such a desire is impossible, for it runs counter to the postulate of his own non- imaginary presence. The narrator cannot fully relieve himself of the intimations of failure which attend his project. The voice of the 'pourvoyeur' is ominous, por- tending disaster: Comme si, avec le chant Sporadique de l'oiseau au-dehors, elle rendait plus sensible encore le silence, la penombre on s'epaissfl:entre les quatre murs et sous 1e plafond dechiquete cette tenace puanteur particuliere aux desastres, d'une consistance pour ainsi dire palpable, grise. (Lc; p.55) The narrator remains frozen in the dialogic exchange between himself and his interlocutorial context, and cannot free himself from this dependency, for he is not the final author of his destiny. The dynamics of his self-delusion are inscribed within a pattern of failure, that which mirrors the sense of failure subtending his condition. It is the feeling of death which afflicts the authorial inter- locutor that must ultimately frame the paradox by which the narrator seeks to transcend his situation, and convert it into a double-bind. Paradox is not by definition restricted to two poles alone. Gregory Bateson in his collection of essays and lectures, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, redefines paradox as a ternary structure couched within a binary opposition: a double bind. In the Zen Buddhist paradigm cited by Bateson the threat Of a beating has three terms of choice and two 225 agents. Unlike Hobson's choice, not only are the two choices bad ones, a third alternative, that of a refusal to choose, has equally unfortunate consequences. The pupil will be beaten whether he identifies his master's stick as real or unreal, but also if he remains silent. The obvious solution, that of a meta-communication, accord- ing to Wilden, is to ignore the master's injunction and to apply the principle of choice to an exchange of rOles. The master is he who wields the stick, therefore expropriation of the instrument will ensure release from the double bind. An application Of this lOgic to literature may be made in the Shape Of a reference to the writer who masters his past by means of autobiOgraphy. The threat of a past exis- tence may be overcome by becoming one with the former self, thereby authorising a passage into the future. The past self can only observe the present author as a possible future projection, thus liberating the latter from his fatalistic sense of confinement. The true conquest of fate can only be achieved where the author feels free to Opt out of the system which directs him. The behaviour of Orestes in Sartre's Les Mouches, in hurriedly rejecting the message of destiny contrasts with Sartre's more tempered autobiographical gesture in Les Mots, where he reassesses the doctrine Of progress: "J'avais fourre le progres continu des bourgeois dans mon ame et j'en faisais un moteur 5 ex- plosion; j'abaissai le passe devant le present et celui-oi devant l'avenir, je transformai un evolutionnisme tranquille en un catatrophisme 226 revolutionnaire et discontinu. (...) il suffit d'un instant, par exemple, pour que L'Oreste des Mouches accomplisse sa conversion. Parbleu: c'est que je les (les personnages) fais 3 mon image."20 Sartre's revolt lies in his acceptance Of a gradualist process of change. It reflects a movement away from the trap Of a revolutionary path, one condemned to pass through the same points repeatedly. His awareness of repetitive patterns, a consciousness more recently acquired, "plus recemment acquise",21 is also the writing of his autobio- graphy, an activity which helps dissipate his earlier con- victions about the necessity for rapid change. Autobiography has its counterparts in confession, just as the solution to the double bind is matched to the notion of impasse. Lawrence Porter, writing on the confessional versus autobiographical novel in two selected works of Andre Gide, identifies the former as regressive and cir- cular: But the artist-narrator in autobiograpy por- trays himself completing one work and moving on, or abandoning a futile project to embark on a more promising one. The narrator's crea- tions become his children and go on to lead independent lives of their own. In contrast, the self-absorbed compulsive ritual of the con- fessional apologetics continually re-enacts the same few moments from the past. It ultimately represents an appeal to the audience to replace the narrator's lost or rejected parents. Auto- biographical awareness resolves itself as achievement; confessional unawareness, as re— gression.22 The confessional novelist is typically self-absorbed rather than Other-directed, for him his condition has no 227 release, only the brief respite of a reprieve. In a deterministic environment the novelist does not feel free to reject the system of which he is a part; his autore- flexive impulse takes on the compulsive, ritualistic com- plexion of the supplicant seeking absolution from his present condition. He does not become one with his past, but attempts to relive the past with a view to expurga- tion. He seeks a freedom in the confessional equation which neutralises past suffering, but is haunted by the ephemerality of liberty thus gained. He remains unaware that his regression makes of his past a futurality, for he can only continue to retrospect. His present task is rendered more imposing and frenetic by the impasse: he has with each passing moment less time in which to review his panOply of past failures. Unlike the autobiOgrapher, the confessionalist has no future prospect, but can only dwell with increasing intensity upon the imminence of his own end. The writer does not escape the double bind pro- posed by the Zen master, but entrenches his own position by a refusal to answer. This choice offers no ultimate salvation. The novelist as pupil is aware, however, that a re- sponse is never immediate, and that he can occupy the ‘pause which separates the question from the answers avail- able to him. In order to invade this Space effectively, he must recycle time. The speed of each cycle of re- gression must accelerate as the time remaining diminishes, 228 if a sense of balance is to be maintained. Each successive revolution of past moments must be accomplished more quick- ly so that the cycle elapsed does not subtract from the cycles remaining. The increase in speed can be measured in literary terms by the progressive breakdown in the con- fessional posture. The delay in dealing with the past effectively augments the sense Of urgency and becomes in- creasingly disjunctive, automatic and schizoid as it sets up an Opposition between anxiety and procrastination which moves towards the delirium of the perfect machine. The silence of the pupil concerning his intentions is never a definitive reply, for it defies the limits Of the double bind, describing an asymptotic curve which directs the sub- ject towards the truth of madness, where time becomes in- finitely small and speed infinitely great. The narrative design of Legon de choses incorporates a regressive cycle, "Courts-circuits" which leads the narrator into a system of delirium through a doubling Of the self. The divided consciousness of the narrator re- duplicates in microcosm the master disciple configuration which exists between interlocutor and narrator. In contra- distinction to the narrator's selves, the interlocutor proper is never dramatised and thus can never exchange posfldons with the narrator, who must remain subordinate to the forces which lend him shape and definition. In order to combat the malevolent demonic figure of the interlocutor the narrator can only internalise the adversary that stands 229 between himself and full control of his fiction. By driving the narrator to the point of delirium the inter- locutor incarnates an aspect of himself as anti—Christ in the rOle of the double; in the ensuing conflict within the narrator the novel is imbued with the comforting illusion of hOpe, a power which delivers the world of the novel from its drift toward perdition, but at the expense of the narrator's sanity. The confessional posture of the au- thorial interlocutor is maintained only by the demolition of the core of the narrative, its fictionalising agent. Delirium is never far from the surface of the narra- tor's perception in Legon de choses. The language of the narrative voice, although disembodied, is less than im- passive, it is imprinted with a lOgic which Colette Gaudin labels as pulsive, reflecting the unconscious drives of the narrator. C'est donc finalement vers une lOgique pulsionnelle que guide ce langage fausse- ment impassible.23 Girard outlines a lOgic of mimetic rather than libid— inal desire in "Systéme du delire" which is consistent with the reading of the double bind proposed above and reflec- tive of the condition of the narrator at the moment when he alchemically transmutes the novel into an oneiric inver- ision of perceived reality. Girard proposes a reciprocity Of mimetic activity based upon the rivalry between model and disciple. The frustration of the disciple desire leads it to enter a reactive phase, which Girard will later take 230 to be responsible for all real manifestations of desire: Le conflit des desirs resulte automatiquement de leur caractere mimetique. C'est ce mecanisme forcement, qui determine les caracteres de ce que Nietzsche appelle ressentiment. Le re-du ressentiment, c'est 1e ressac du desir qui se heurte a l'obstacle du desir mortel; forcement contrarie par le modele, 1e desir disciple reflue vers sa source pour l'empoisonner.24 The final pages of "La Charge de Reichshoffen", the penultimate section of Legon de choses contain a reprise of the motif of the seeing ear, which appeared as a re- frain in La Bataille de Pharsale, "oreille qui peut 25 voir". The eye not the ear becomes the organ of vision in its new context, and will transcend the suffering which poisoned ear/sight in the earlier work. The toxins of Mithridate have yielded to the quintessential elixirs of Paracelsus as night transmutes into day and pain into hope. The metronomic winking of a lighthouse produces the mechanical hallucination of a pathway of light across the water at the exact moment of nightfall. The route to the stars offers an alternative to the murky reptilian depths and undertow of the darkened sea: Soudain, au fond de l'horizon 00 1e ciel ne se separe plus maintenant de la mer, scintille sur la gauche la breve lueur d'un phare qui dis— parait aussitOt, reparait, s'eteint pendant quelques secondes reparait deux fois coup sur coup, demasquee et occultee tour a tour selon un rhythme code avec une regularite de metronome comme si l'oeil - pas l'oreille: l'oeil - pouvait percevoir quelque part a travers le bruit paisible et regulier du ressac l'implacable grignotement des roues dentees, des engrenages, de l'echappement fractionnant le temps en menus intervalles comptabilises, comme si quelque 231 signal venu d'etoiles, d'astres lointains gravitant a des millions d'annees-lumiere les avait tout a coup mis en mouvement pour marquer l'instant, la seconde precise de la separation du jour et de la nuit, declenchant en meme temps l'apparition soudaine d'un fugitif chemin de reflets sur l'etendue tenebreuse qui ne se distingue plus de la plage que par une incessante mouvance, confusement pergue, de noires et statiques ondulations comme celles d'une chevelure liquide reptilienne et visqueuse. (Lc; p.171) The uneasy admixture of peace and implacability does not bode well for the new vision of the eye. Blind ’ throughout Simon's later works, the eye now enters into a redemptive activity, but the mechanistic aspect of the sight now regained bears considerable resemblance not only to the 'ressac' of the sea, but that of Nietzschean ressentiment described by Girard. Redemption and death combine in paradoxical counterpoint as the voyeur is given back the capacity to see. The narrative voice becomes in- creasingly Optimistic against a backdrop of monstrous darkness and blindness, he is redeemed even as everything around him connotes a horizon Of damnation. At the end of "La Charge de Reichshoffen", sight appears as aberrant as blindness; the giant motionless form Of the voyeuristic cow which has been a silent witness to the couple's love- making, is illuminated by the flame of a match, and one of .its two eyes takes on the extreme lightness Of an albino colouring: Il peut voir son oeil farde de noir, l'autre borde de rose pale et sa frange de cils soyeux et decolores comme ceux d'un albinos. (Lc; p.173) 232 The match will burn the man's fingers and be dropped, emphasising the interlocution with darkness against which the doubling of the eye occurs. The split in the narrative voice is prefigured in the opposition between the cow's eyes, and in the relationship of the cow to death; a dead cow appears as the upended counterpart to the hulking immobility of the cow which looms over the couple: "1a vache morte dresse vers le ciel ses quatre pattes raides comme des piquets." (Lc; p.141). Just as the doubling of the voice contains but is distinct from the relation between interlocutor and narrator, so the dark silhouette Of the cow before it is illuminated by a flame stands out from its nocturnal surroundings, "ses cornes noires et horizontales se decoupant, Opaques sur le ciel d'un noir different." (Lc; p.155). The differentiation between shades of gloom allows the cow to take statuesque Shape and im- plicitly thereby to take on a macabre impression Of life as night is doubled, creating phantoms Of itself which are copresent with living forms. The immobility of the cow, both in life and death, is taken up in the immobility of the trapped soldiers as a symbol not only of death, but of a phantasmal perpetuation of mortality: Le tireur semble composer avec le chargeur assis a cOte sur une caisse un de ces groupes grossierement moules sur nature dans le platre liquide et qui, dans les musees ou sur les monuments aux morts, sont figes dans une terrifiante immobilite, comme non seulement 1a negation du mouvement et de la vie mais une perpetuation macabre, fantomatique, de l'instantane et du perissable. (Lc; p.152) 233 The fate of the narrator, allegorised in the images of the cow and soldiers, is to be possessed by a demonic other conjured from the forms adopted by a horizon of night and death. The narrator of "Courts circuits" is to enjoy what Girard terms a critical period of delirium, but without the attendant experience of destruction and death evoked by Girard. The narrator does violence to his own narration at the last, and in his self-overpower- ing enjoys the delusion of omnipotence: Avec la violence reciproque, on entre dans une phase critique, celle qui debouche sur le delire et la folie, bien sfir, et aussi sur la destruc- tion et sur la mort.26 The truth of novelistic desire, as Girard reminds us at the conclusion of "Mensonge romantique et verite romanesque" is not death but redemption, but in Legon de choses the latter illusion is achieved at the expense of the narrator's psychic breakdown into the madness of the double. Girard deploys the example of Dostoievsky to illustrate the Operation of delirium as obeying a logic of doubling: Implicitement au moins, Dostoievsky structure et explique 1e delire en fonction des doubles. C'est le delire lui-méme qui tient a faire des doubles une fantasmagor'ie sans importance. Les deux partenaires vivent trop passionnement l'exaltation, c'est-a-dire 1a depossession, pour s'attacher au schema d'ensemble, pour constater qu'ils occupent tour a tour les memes positions dans un meme systeme de rapports.27 The narrator lacks awareness Of the total scheme in which he plays a part and so cannot comprehend the rhetoric NOTES Frangoise von Rossum-Guyon, "Le Nouveau Roman comme critique du roman'" in Nouveau Roman: Hier, aujourd'hui, 1, Problémes genEraux (Paris: U.G.E. 10/18, 1972), pT229. 2 . . Julia Kristeva, "Le Texte clos," Langages 12 (1968) p.125. ' ' 3 Claude Simon, La Bataille de Pharsale (Paris: Minuit, 1969), p.271. 4 Kristeva, p.124. 5 Kristeva, p.121. 6 Julia Kristeva, "Pour une semiologie des para- grammes," Tel Quel 29 (1967),pp.67-8. My brackets. 7 Claude Simon, Legon de choses (Paris: Minuit, 1975), pp.10-11. Subsequent references appear in the textso, (LC). 8 Frangois Jost, "Les Aventures du lecteur," Poetique 8 no.29 (1977), p.88. 9 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Thoughts on the Principle of Allegory," Genre 5 (l972),p.348. 10 Spivak, p.346. 11 p.68. Kristeva, "Pour une semiolOgie des paragrammes," 12 Spivak, p.346. 13 Irene Tschinka, "La Fabrique du corps ou la corrida du hors-corps," in Claude Simon: Analyse, Theorie (Paris: 234 235 U.G.E. 10/18, 1975) p.396. 14 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea Bk 3, Section 52, in Schopenhauer: Selections ed. DeWitt H. Parker (New York: ScribherTs Sons, 1928), p.180. 15 Claude Simon, Triptyque (Paris: Minuit, 1973), p.90. 16 Raymond Jean, in Claude Simon: Analyse, Theorie, p.261. 17 Rene Girard, La Violence et le sacre (Paris: Grasset, 1972), p.204. 18 Girard, p.205. 19 Girard, p.229. 20 Jean Paul Sartre, Les Mots (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p.198. 21 Sartre, p.201. 22 Laurence M. Porter, "Autobiography versus Con- fessional Novel: Gide's L'Immoraliste and Si Le Grain ne meurt," Symposium 30 (1976), p.156. 23 Colette Gaudin, "Niveaux de lisibilite dans Legon de choses de Claude Simon," Romanic Review 68 (1977), p.184? 24 Rene Girard, "Systeme du delire," Critique 28 (1972), P.965. 25 Simon, La Bataille de Pharsale, p.58. 6 Girard, "Systeme du delire," p.967. 7 Girard, "Systeme du delire," p.968. CONCLUSION The later novels of Claude Simon present a world Of signs in which and by which the narrator discovers the world. Simon explores his manner of writing in "Les Sentiers de la creation", a preface to Orion Aveugle, by extolling the virtue of words, which assemble in the manner Of bricolage, objects and events otherwise fated to remain heterOgeneouS. Writing, through the powers of attraction exercised by the linguistic sign, permits the agglomeration of words and images in a free inter- play of signifiers and signifieds: Chaque mot en suscite (ou en commande) plusieurs autres, non seulement par la force des images qu'il attire a lui comme un aimant, mais parfois aussi par sa seule morphologie, de simples assonances qui de meme que les necessites formelles de la syntaxe, du rythme et de la composition, se revelent souvent aussi fecondes que ses multiples significations.l Simon defines the novel as a fiction in which charac- ters are involved in an action, but the action is that of the flow of signs, which constitutes a more trustworthy guide to the world than the psycho-drama of novelistic realism: Roman qui cependant ne racontera pas l'histoire exemplaire de quelque heros ou heroine, mais cette toute autre histoire qui est l'aventure singuliere du narrateur qui ne cesse de chercher, 236 237 decouvrant a tatons le monde dans et par l'ecriture.2 A singular adventure indeed, for a narrator who succeeds only in scrambling a narrative so completely as to obliterate the image of perfection he pursues, like the artist Frenhofer in Balzac's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu. The narrator cannot match his own resources to those of writing, and the novel progresses not to an end, but to his end, as Simon somewhat contradictorily points out: Aussi ne peut-il avoir d'autre terme que l'epuisement du voyageur explorant ce paysage inepuisable.3 The exhaustion of the narrator leads ultimately to the prospect of his being consumed in flames, as was Frenhofer, for the narrator cannot tolerate the display of his own impotence in Lecon de choses. Simon in an interview with DuVerlie, "The Crossing of the Image", uses the image of signs as a metaphor for blindness: The complete title of this painting is, "Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun". That seemed to symbolise my own work: the writer advancing blindly in his language, groping in the midst of a forest of signs toward something he will never attain.4 It is, as Simon indicates, a common experience for partists to create something very different from their original project, but Simon's words illustrate Girard's analysis of the pathological development of mimetic desire in which the presence of a competing desire is taken to in- dicate that a true Object Of desire is hidden behind the 238 obstacle of rivalry: Le desir finit par constater 1a metamorphose toujours repetee du modele en Obstacle. Au lieu de tirer les conclusions qui s'imposent, au lieu de reconnaitre le caractere mecanique de la rivalite qu'on lui Oppose, i1 choisit la seconde solution, celle qui va lui permettre de survivre au savoir de lui-meme qu'il est en train d'acquerir. Il decide de voir dans cet obstacle, qui surgitde fagon repetee sous ses pas, la preuve que le desirable est vraiment 15. Il choisit le chemin barre, la route interdite, comme devant mener a cela qu'il cherche. Alors se dressent, derriere chaque obstacle, cette totalite fermee, ce jardin clos, cette haute forteresse que decrivent si frequemment les metaphores du desir.5 Simon is led to select the path least likely to succeed in assuaging his autobiographical needs,for only in this way can he erase the feeling of failure experienced at his first traditional work, the autobiography La Corde £3392} The thicket of signs which impedes his progress to- ward the sun allows him the prOSpect of unattainable bliss. Rather than confront his unsuccess, it becomes necessary to him as part of the mechanism of surviving the threat of self-knowledge. Simon's commentaries upon his novels reveal a death anxiety similar to that which permeates authorial inter- locution in his novels. The narrator of Legon de choses cannot maintain an insular utOpia of self-reflexive writing 'because he short-circuits his narrative. The doubling of the narrator represents a compulsive intrusion of the inter- locutor into the Edenic level of the fiction, he is unable to Observe his customary aphasia, for his discomfort has 239 reached unendurable levels. Omnipotence is in practice identical to castration, Girard suggests, "La toute- puissance de la production desirante ne se distingue pas, dans la pratique, d'une castration radicale."6 To pursue the biblical analOgy Offered in the introduction, the logical corollary to Adam's fall is the birth Of Christ, for without recruitment on earth God presides over a de- populated heaven. The authorial interlocutor of Simon's later novels is one who has allowed self-knowledge to become the pre- serve Of linguistic consciousness. Ostracised from the fictional world he has created, he has no means by which to pursue his own initiation into the self, but must Ob- serve from elsewhere the metaphor of desire purveyed by a utOpia of language. His omnipotence is barren and human; unlike the God Of the Old Testament he must exist with the uncomfortable prickings of a repressed knowledge of mortal- ity and of haying fallen from grace. The irruption Of the authorial interlocutor into the foreground of Legon de choses proves satanic for the narrator's fiction, and the Faustian message of hope is couched in the flames of de- lirium. For the interlocutor, his dramatisation in the form Of the narrator's double signifies a penetration into 'the realm of self-consciousness and the potential for a less repressed and more balanced treatment Of anthrOpo- morphic concerns. With the conclusion of Legon de choses the drives of 240 the human subject surface into the logocentric design of the text, presaging an interlocution less concerned to distinguish itself from its subject by chiaoscuro effects of contrast and more at pains to create an harmon- ious integration of the resources of representation and reality. Legon de choses offers an end to the history of the play of language traced by the itinerary of Simon's later works, and sets the stage for a return to the language of Simon's personal and genealogical history. NOTES 1 pp.6-7. Claude Simon, Orion Aveugle (Geneva: Skira, 1970), 2 Simon, p.10. 3 Simon, p.9. 4 Claude Simon in "The Crossing of the Image," an interview with Claud DuVerlie, Diacritics 7, no.4 (1977), p.52. 5 Rene Girard, "Systeme du delire," Critique 28 (1972), p.967. 6 Girard, p.967. 241 BIBLIOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Simon, Claude, Le Vent. Paris: Minuit, 1957. ---------- . La Bataille de Pharsale. Paris: Minuit, ---------- . Les Corps conducteurs. Paris: Minuit, 1971. ---------- . Triptyque. Paris: Minuit, 1973. ---------- . Legon de choses. Paris: Minuit, 1975. Secondary Sources Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977. Barilli, Renato. "Neutralisation et difference", in Robbe—Grillet: Analyse, Theorie I, Roman/Cinema. 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