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The poetry of an example: Toward a compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics of language in the texts of Michael Riffaterre, Honore de Balzac, and Walter Benjamin

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The poetry of an example: Toward a compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics of language in the texts of Michael Riffaterre, Honore de Balzac, and Walter Benjamin

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Content THE POETRY OF AN EXAMPLE: TOWARD A COMPATIBILITY OF A HERMENEUTICS AND A POETICS OF LANGUAGE IN THE TEXTS OF MICHAEL RIFFATERRE, HONORE DE BALZAC, AND WALTER BENJAMIN by Elizabeth Anne Wolf A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Comparative Literature) December 1990 Copyright 1990 Elizabeth Anne Wolf UMI Number: DP22556 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Dissertation Publishing UMI DP22556 Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA p THE GRADUATE SCHOOL I b L A UNIVERSITY PARK Co LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089 mss This dissertation, written by ELIZABETH ANNE WOLF under the direction of h. ex. Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re quirements for the degree of D O C T O R O F P H IL O S O P H Y Dean of Graduate Studies Date Nov. 30, 1990 DISSERTATION COMMITTEE PRQFESSOR VINpfNT FAR E NG A , COM PA RAT IV E LITERATURE Chairperson MANNING, ENGLISH FRENCH AND ITALIAN PR0FESS0 This dissertation is dedicated to my sister, Sheila Layne Louscher, and to the distances we help each other travel. iii Acknowledgments ! i I would like to thank the members of my committee for the generosity and consistency of their support. To I Professors Vincent Farenga, Peter J. Manning, and Albert Sonnenfeld, I owe a debt of gratitude that reaches far | beyond the boundaries of the pages that follow. In I particular, I would like to thank Professor Farenga for j the model of theoretical rigor that he has provided not | only to me but to virtually every student of English and American Literatures, French and Italian Literatures, i Classics, and Comparative Literatures at the University of Southern California. I would like to thank Professor Manning for the exemplary model of undergraduate teaching I that he has set for me, but more than this, the | Benjaminian model of "counsel," "life," and "wisdom" that i his scholarship exemplifies for the profession at large. In particular, I would like to thank Professor Sonnenfeld for the enthusiasm with which he recommended me to the attention of the faculty of the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College and, more generally, for the model of academic and administrative theatricality with which he enriches the lives of students and faculty alike. Finally, I would like to thank all three for having nominated me for the fellowships and scholarships that have funded the writing of this dissertation: at USC, an Oakley Dissertation Research Fellowship? at Dartmouth, a SCT Scholarship; and at Harvard, a Whiting Foundation Faculty Enrichment Fellowship. From my immediate past, I would like to remember Professor Sacvan Bercovitch for having opened the liminal doors of Harvard University to me; from a more distant past, I would like to remember Professor Marjorie Perloff, not only for having served as the chairperson of my . masters and doctoral qualification examination committees,! but for having provided the example of academic excellence1 that prepared me to pass through Harvardfs doors. ! Finally, I would like to thank Professor Anne M. Menke of Swarthmore College and Professor Teresia de I Vroom of Loyola Marymount University. I could not have ! written this dissertation without the very devoted friendship of each of these women. I might have added their names to the list of works cited: I have found the most influential text on feminist theory that I will ever read in the form of Anne's life; I have found the most influential text on romantic comedy that I will ever read in the form of Teresia1s. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION PART I: A CONVERGENCE OF DISCOURSES Chapter I: "The Style is the Text Itself": Riffaterre and the Rude Mechanical's Performance i ....................................... 33 Chapter II: "Tournez les yeux..., apercevez vous.. Balzac and the Illusion of the Candle a Bras 68 Chapter III: "The Figure that Fascinates": Benjamin and the Prayer for the Little Hunchback" 120 PART II: GENRE, GENDER, AND HISTORY Chapter IV: The Shelter of a Matrix: the Matrical and Mediatrical Closure of Comedic Structure 157 CONCLUSION "The Whore Called 'Once Upon a Time1": the Figurative Limitations of the Essay's Illumination 172 List of Figures Chapter Fig. Fig. Chapter Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. 1. Millet, Jean-Frangois. "LfAngelus" (1857- 1859). Paris: Musee d'Orsay. 2. Klee, Paul. "Angelus Novus" (1920). Ill 1 . J.B. Launay. Untitled etching ( 1 8 2 5 ) . 2. "Les Etoiles de Napoleon, «Stellae Napoleonis,» introduites dans la constellation d*Orion par l'Universite de Leipzig en 1 8 0 7 ." (Fac-simile d'un gravure allemande). 3. La "Table d'Austerlitz ou des Marechaux." 4. "Elevation de la Colonne de la place Vendome." 5. "La Colonne de la place Vendome, avec la statue de Napoleon." 6. "Statue de l'empereur Napoleon pour la Colonne de la place Vendome, par Chaudet." 7. The Empress Josephine's coronation diadem..., 1804, (Van Cleef and Arpels). 8. Jacques Louis David. "Detail from the coronation painting" ( 1 8 0 5 - 1 8 0 8 ) . 9. "Feu d*artifice, tire en face de la place de Greve, le 16 decembre 1 8 0 4 ." 10. Job and Georges Montorgueil. Untitled illustration ( 1 9 2 1 ). 11. Chasselat. "Josephine vient d'apprendre de Napoleon sa volonte arretee de divorcer; .. (30 novembre 1 8 0 9 ) . " 1 Introduction "...do we not generally regard as the essential substance of a literary work what it contains in addition to information— as even a poor translator will admit— the unfathomable, the mysterious, the , 'poetic* something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also a poet?" — Walter Benjamin "Explication of texts is really a machine for taming a work, for defusing it by reducing it to habits, to the reigning ideology, to familiar mythology, to something reassuring. ... So we have to change our course and head toward the unique, the ineffable, the je ne sais auoi that we have been kindly warned is accessible only through some mystical operation." --Michael Riffaterre | "Friends of my soul, you twain/ | Rule in this realm, and the I gored state sustain." j — William Shakespeare I In the most general of terms, this dissertation is concerned with the compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics of literature; more specifically, however, it is concerned with the ways in which literary theorists and critics write about that which exceeds the grasp of rational cognition. Thus, in beginning, it is important to note that this dissertation is written at a time when the questions asked about literature and language are increasingly directed to what we can know— cognitively and rationally— about history, historiography, histori- cism, and historical materialism, at a time when ques tions about stylistics are increasingly overshadowed by questions about the rhetorical and figurative creation of historical event. Today we ask how canons are formed, how literary histories are written, how lan guages function as ideological tools, and how they are gendered, but we ask these questions in order to analyze what meaning language makes in culturally specific and historically determinate literary contexts. If, in 1980, the division chairpersons of the Modern Language Association called for papers on the indeterminacy of language, on the play, slippage, 1990, they are calling for papers addressing the following subjects: FILM "The Institutionalization of Film Studies" LITERARY CRITICISM "After Glasnost: Whither Marxist Criticism" PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES TO LITERATURE "The Question of Practice: Praxis, Practical Reason, and Politics" COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE LITERATURE "Literary Texts and Cultural History" COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM AND THE 19TH-CENTURY "Gender and Genre" Speaking for all of us as members of an association, these chairpersons tell us that we are far less concerned with "the unfathomable, the mysterious, and the 9poetic1 something" of literature, than with gender issues, institutional issues, and political issues. They point to the fact that, as a group, we are asking, with less and less frequency, how the language used to talk about these issues exceeds the limits of any grammar. Of the many demands made upon us in the current academic climate, then, the demand for an articulated theory of a compatibility between an interpretive, or hermeneutic, theory of literature and a descriptive, or Ipoetic, theory of literature recurs with increasing urgency. This is the case regardless of whether we are speaking of a Christian, a Marxist, or a French Symboliste interpretation; this is the case regardless of whether we are speaking of a method of threatment that is "poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive;j [regardless of whether it] proceeds by definition, division, proof, refutation, and the setting forth of, examples." 1 Finally, this is the case not only because, in a climate that privileges social relevancy over the philosophical abstraction of stylistics, there is a particularly strong need for articulated theories about the relation of literature and language to the limits of 4 rational cognition but also because since the publication, in 1987, of Paul de Man's war time writings, there has been a stultifying, if understandable, hesitation to take up questions that are so heavily indebted to his work. The risk we run if we allow questions of hermeneutic or interpretive theory to throw an obfuscating shadow over poetics, however, is the risk of advancing the work of gender, political, and institutional studies as if: the language that constructs these studies were not often preoccupied with the work of frustrating a compatibility that defines literature's mode of knowledge or truth in terms that place rationality and mysticism or irrationality in an oppositional relation and, thereby, deny the two categories simultaneous expression. In particular, we run the risk of failing to consider the ways in which the figuration of language enters into the success or failure of the compatibility. In the following pages, I will therefore move toward the articulation of a theory of compatibility that acknowledges the ways in which two specific and recurrent types of figurations— those of history and female bodies— have functioned simultaneously to initiate and frustrate the ability to theorize the relation between that which defines and that which escapes the cognitive limits of hermeneutic systems. I argue that when history and the female body are figured as forces of random and irrational events— forces from which the rational mind must be protected— they are also associated with a poetics from which a hermeneutics must be sheltered. j Because this sheltering appears in the form of a hermeneutic pattern, a set of generic conventions through which a circle of riddles and solutions is closed, it functions as a tautology. The hermeneutic shelters the hermeneutic by casting the figuration of history and/or the female body in a form that will protect rational cognition. From the above, I conclude that the possibility for ' a compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics of literature is contingent upon the function of figuration. I suggest that because figurations of history and female ! bodies surface with regularity as the signs in which the figure functions to distance a hermeneutics from a 1 poetics of literature, they organize the most promising space in which to imagine a different function for I figuration, one that will allow for the compatibility between a hermeneutics and a poetics of literature. In arguing this, I move beyond the boundaries with which Paul de Man frames his analyses of the compati bility. I read de Man’s texts through the lens of 6 another— one that performs the compatibility between a poetics and a hermeneutics in the particular terms of the collapse of history into the female body and the collapse of both into silence, madness, and death— Shakespeare's Kincr Lear, Thus, in addition to analyzing selected literary theories that have implied a compatibility of that which is and that which is not rational in language, a compatibility of that which can be controlled and that which cannot be controlled in it, I have also been concerned with analyzing that which in literature and language itself implies the compatibility. For this reason, I have repeatedly turned to the plays, poems, and narratives with which the literary theory I study carries on an intertextual discourse: the texts of Balzac, Kafka, Rimbaud, and Shakespeare, as well as those of Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, and Michael Riffaterre. 7 II PART Is A CONVERGENCE OF DISCOURSES 1,1 The Style is the Text Itself1: Riffaterre and the Rude Mechanical * s Performance" "'Tournez les yeux..., apercevez vous.. .?' : Balzac and the Illusion of the Candle a Bras" "'The Figure that Fascinates': Benjamin and the Prayer for the Little Hunchback" Chapters one and two of the dissertation are organized, respectively, as readings of emblematic texts drawn from two fields of literary study: formalist analysis and nineteenth century French realism. In particular, I refer to the work of Michael Riffaterre and Honore de Balzac. In my readings of Riffaterre's textual i analysis as well as Balzac's social analysis, I claim that a convergence of contradictory discourses— banal, technical, and poetic in the former case; political, sexual, and poetic in the latter case— enables the successful initiation of a compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics by simultaneously blurring and stabilizing the boundaries that have alternately defined literature as a fully-reversible, self-referential reseau or a non- reversible, referential system.2 The second chapter is written as a specific response to the limitations of a formalist interpretation. In it, I trace the path by which formalism's successful 8 initiation of a compatibility ends in an issueless cul- de-sac by turning to the text that Riffaterre has taken as an exemplum of narrative production, Balzac's La Paix du menage. Through my own reading of the Scene. I attempt to trace the ways in which early nineteenth century realism has served as a model for the compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics as it is initiated by formalist analysis. I begin with interdisciplinary associations: a rendering of the machine with which the Vendome Column is broken in half in 1814 and an etching by Chasselat of the Emperor Napoleon announcing, to Josephine, his intent to divorce. In the process, I draw an intertextual association between Balzac's text and de Bausset's Memoires sur 11interieur du Palais and end by restoring to the text the very words on the page that Riffaterre has elided— in specific terms, une colonne brisee [a broken column] and la dame bleue [the lady in blue]; in more general and far-reaching terms, however, the relation of the historical referent to the figuration of the female body, the relation that allows Balzac to initiate the compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics. In chapter three, I turn to the texts of a representative historical and materialist interpretor: particularly, the essays of Walter Benjamin. Beginning 9 with interdisciplinary associations, I continue with intertextual associations and place Benjmamin's texts into relation with the figure of the hunchback as it appears in both German folksongs and prose pieces written by Kafka. Once again, I claim that a convergence of contradictory discourses— in this case, theological/"counselory," materialist, and poetic— enables the successful initiation of the compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics by simultaneously blurring and stabilizing discursive boundaries. I I PART II: GENRE, GENDER, AND HISTORY "The Shelter of a Matrix: the Matrical and Mediatrical Closure of Comedic Structure" "'The Whore called "Once Upon a Time"*: the Figurative Limitations of the Hunchback's Counsel" In chapter four, I consider the relation of genre to the figurations of history and female bodies that we find i i in Riffaterre*s and Balzac's texs. Returning to Riffaterre's theory, I argue that both its distortions of Balzacs La Paix du m&nage and its failure to achieve a sustained compatibility of a poetic s and a hermeneutics of literature result from a generic ocmpetition that is i i complicitous with a figuration of history as a comedy and a figuration of the female body as the theater in which that comedy may be performed. I argue, further, that 10 Balzac has preceded Riffaterre in the distortion of textual signs— and to like ends. The convergence of discourses effected in Riffaterre's theory and the convergence of discourses effected in Balzac's text are advanced, and limited, by means of parallel figurations of history and female bodies; the convergences compete, however, over the generic form in whose service these figurations will be made to perform. I show that the poetic discourse organizing Riffaterre's theory is read and reinvented according to the conventions of romantic comedy while the poetic discourse organizing Balzac's Scene is written according to the contradictory > conventions of (1) the medieval miracle play's divine comedy and (2) the biographer's and journalist's descriptive records of the metonymic trope of historical events that exceed the control of rational cognition. I trace the ways in which Riffaterre rewrites texts as romantic comedies by figuring the historical referent as a fallacy and replacing it with the matrix or womb and compare this to the ways in which Balzac rewrites texts as failed divine comedies by figuring the historical referent as the enemy of a perceived human perfection and replacing it with an androgynous Virgin-Conqueror whose desired intercession transforms the human into the divine. I conclude the chapter by claiming that the shared insistence on figuring history and women*s bodies as the time and place of eomedic redemption ends by frustrating the success of both Riffaterre*s and Balzac's attempts. In both cases, it censors the play of signification in ways that preclude the poetics of the respective texts from entering into a sustained compatibility with a hermeneutics of literature. In Riffaterre's case, signifiers are seignorially elided in order that the cognitive control exercised in a hermeneutic activity might remain unchallenged; in Balzac's case, historical referents are apocalyptically selected and arranged in such a way as to ensure a condemnation that will end forever the tensive balance of hermeneutic discovery and poetic play— in order, again, to ensure that the stabi lizing force of the hermeneutic activity might remain unchallenged. In both, there is a movement in the direc tion of "the unique, the ineffable, the je ne sais cruoi". but in both, there is a figurative and generic resolve that interrupts the movement. I In the final chapter of the dissertation, I return to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations. I argue that Benjamin's i attempt to render compatible a hermeneutics and a poetics of literature differs from both Riffaterre*s and Balzac's in that it is organized, not as an imposition of a 12 generic pattern but as a complement. Because the form of Benjamin*s writing, the form of the essay, allows the random and irrational trope of the signification to escape genre*s demand for regulation and convention, it provides a stage upon which to perform the compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics of literature. Because i the essay has not yet been codified, because it throws into question the law of genre even as it invokes its presence, the essay can escape the circumscriptive gestures of genre— gestures that limit the poetic play of signification and frustrate the convergence of contradic tory discourses upon which the compatibility depends. I continue, however, by claiming that although Benjamin*s essays have proven more successful than either Riffaterre*s romantic comedies or Balzac's human comedies in constructing an unboundaried stage upon which the convergence of contradictory discourses may be sustained, they have nevertheless been equally frustrated in effecting a compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics of literature. For Benjamin imposes the same complicity of figurations upon the discourses of his essays as Riffaterre and Balzac impose upon their respective comedies: the past, he writes in "The Theses on the Philosophy of History," is like women who could have given themselves to us ["Frauen, die sich uns hatten 13 geben konnen"]; historicism is a whore ["Hure"] in a brothel ["Bordell”]. Such language returns us once again to a hermeneutic circle that protects rational cognition? it interrupts the poetic play of signification and i frustrates the compatibility between a hermeneutics and a poetics of literature. In conclusion, then, I argue that despite the differences in style, genre, ideology, and politics that separate them, Benjamin, Riffaterre, and Balzac end by employing like figures for like ends. Each figures history as a female body and in doing so exercises a choice— a choice that effectively suppresses the play of textual signification and transforms chance into design. I suggest that it is the decision to figure history as well as female bodies as a threat to rational cognition, j in conjunction with the decision to employ these figures as tools by which to place the text in the service of j i rational cognition, that currently poses the most serious I i obstacle to the compatibility of a poetics and a : hermeneutics of literature. j i III In large part, my work on genre and figuration, as well as on poetics and hermeneutics, has grown out of my engagement with the structuralist and deconstructive j interests with which the field of literary theory has been preoccupied for the past two decades. In addition, however, it has grown out of earlier phenomenological I interests and practices. Before turning to the chapters that I have summarized above, then, let me situate my study in specific relation to the work that has been most influential in my study of the compatibility of a phenomenology, a hermeneutics, and a poetics of language. As I have noted, my study of poetics and the relation of literature and language to the limits of rational cognition is necessarily indebted to the work of Paul de Man. Let me add to this, however, that it is also specifically indebted to the work of Geoffrey Hartman. It was in the context of reading his essay on | Michael Riffaterre1s work, "The Use and Abuse of ! Structural Analysis," that I initially conceived of a j study of figuration that would effect the unlikely i i j association of the work of Walter Benjamin and Michael Riffaterre. Hartman writes: It is a truism, of course, that no method can guarantee an interpretation. At most it can assure an open, articulate, and transferable kind of analytic procedure. But two specific remarks can be made of all methods or techniques of analysis, including Riffaterre1s: (1) They are unable to determine, qua method, what finding is to be emphasized. (2) Methods are backed up by methodizers: there is a person in the machine. Consequently, even where the method successfully disciplines the personal factor, the latter can still make its appearance, as in the choice of the object of analysis: this poem rather than that. (130) Whether by chance or design* it happened that at the time that I was reading Hartman's essay, I was also reading Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History and thinking about the hunchbacked figure of the chessmaster whom Benjamin describes as hiding inside a machine [Apparatur] pulling the strings of a puppet that appears to be an automaton. What interested me was (1) the relation of master interpreters to the machines in which they conceal themselves, and (2) the relation of figuration to mastery, disguise, and autonomy. In this regard, what interested me most was Benjamin's identification of the figure (hunchback) with the person (master) and his assertion that the figure/person must be kept out of sight: ... Zu dieser Apparatur kann man sich ein Gegenstuck in der Philosophie vorstellen. Gewinnen soil immer die Puppe, die man ,,historischen Materialismus'' nennt. Sie kann es ohne weiteres mit jedem aufnehmen, wenn sie die Theologie in ihren Dienst nimmt, die heute bekanntlich klein und haBlich ist und sich ohnehin nicht darf blicken lassen. (494) [One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of Theology which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.] In tandem with Hartman's stated interest in reconciling a phenomenological perspective with a structuralist reading I by integrating "concepts of time, voice, presence, and history, with language" (149), the tropic coincidence of "the person in the machine" making choices and the hunchback in the machine pulling strings led me to ask if one might not learn a great deal about the relations of poetics to hermeneutics as well as phenomenology if one read Riffaterre's texts side by side with Benjamin's. My questions led me, again, to de Man and to two essays collected in The Resistance to Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 1986): "Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre*s Poetics of Reading," an article originally published in Diacritics (1981), and "Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Translator'," the final lecture in a series delivered at Cornell University (1983). In both the article and the lecture, de Man is interested in the "discrepancy" between "'das Gemeinte,' what is meant, and the 'Art des Meinens,' the way in which language means" ("Conclusions" 86). In both, he is interested in the cognitive failure to render the "disjunction" in terms of a compatibility. 17 I quote two paragraphs, one from each of the essays. Along with Hartman*s "person in the machine," they introduce the terminology that is most central, and recurrent, to my study as a whole. The first is from de Man*s lecture on "The Task of the Translator": The way in which I can try to mean is dependent upon linguistic properties that are not only [not] made by me, because I depend on the language as it exists for the devices which I will be using, it is as such not made by us as historical beings, it is perhaps not even made by humans at all. Benjamin says, from the beginning, that it is not at all certain that language is in any sense human. To equate language with humanity— as Schiller did— is in question. If language is not necessarily human— if we obey the law, if we function within language, and purely in terms of language— there can be no intent; there may be an intent of meaning, but there is no intent in the purely formal way in which we will use language independently of the sense or the meaning. The translation, which puts intentionality on both sides, both in the act of meaning and in the way in which one means, misses a philosophically interesting point— for what is at stake is the possibility of a phenomenology of language, or of poetic language, the possibility of establishing a poetics which would in any sense be a phenomenology of language. This...is best understood... in terms of the difficult relationship between the hermeneutics and the poetics of literature. When you do hermeneutics, you are concerned with the meaning of the work; when you do poetics, you are concerned with the stylistics or with the description of the way in which a work means. The question is whether these two are complementary, whether you can cover 18 the full work by doing hermeneutics and poetics at the same time. (87-88) In the passage, de Man traces the contours of a difference that is fundamental to my argument: he sets into opposition a poetics and a phenomenology/ hermeneutics of language that identifies the difference between the two categories in terms of intent. He argues that a phenomenology, as well as a hermeneutics, of language proceeds from the assumption that the text is invested with meaning or intent that can be experienced and/or discovered; and against this, he sets a poetics of language and the assumption that the text is produced independent of intent, independent of "sense" or "meaning." Consequently, neither sense nor meaning can be retrieved from the text. It exists only as form. That part of the passage over which I puzzled longest is that in which "a lack of intent" is adequated to "a lack of humanity." The logic by which intent and humanity are identified is a logic celebrated by an Enlightenment aesthetics and follows from the belief that that which is human is circumscribed by that which is self-possessed of knowledge or reason. In this context, I found de Man's objection to Schiller (rather than an objection to, say, Roland Barthes) wanting. If de Man's point is to equate a lack of intent and humanity with the "purely formal way in which we will use language independently of the sense or meaning," then why not take the argument up in terms other than Schiller*s— terms that have moved beyond a Platonic theory of the abstract L 1 relation of parts to wholes?* Why not take the argument up in the more specifically phenomenological terms of persons and human bodies and their relations to forms? Thus, in opposition to de Man*s assumption, I proceeded from another. I proceeded from the assumption that that which is human is, indeed, simultaneously irrational and rational, possessed of knowledge, control, j and intent, accessible to the senses, even as it frees itself of the boundaries of understanding. I have wondered if it wouldn*t be possible to say that language that is simultaneously recognized as a rational as well as an irrational discourse possesses the largest and surest share of that which is most human; I have wondered i if this relation could not be demonstrated through a study of the contradictory functions of figuration. 1 The second passage from which I draw is taken from de Man's article on Riffaterre's work, "Hypogram and Inscription." In the selection, de Man maps out the "philosophically interesting" ground upon which the stakes of complementarity are articulated and extends these "stakes" to include the relation of rational 20 cognition to aesthetic shelter, monumentality, and self- referentiality— categories specifically attributed to the form and structure of literature and language. All formalistic theories of poetry sooner or later have to confront a similar problem: their adequation to the phenomenally realized aspects of their topic makes them highly effective as a descriptive discipline, but at the cost of understanding. A monument, per definition, is self-sufficient? it can at most be contemplated but it exists quite independently of its beholder, even and especially when it houses his mortal remains. Formalism, in other words, can only produce a stylistics (or a poetics) and not a hermeneutics of literature, and it remains deficient in trying to account for the relationship between these two approaches. Yet a formalist like Riffaterre feels compelled to integrate the hermeneutic activity of the reader within his enterprise. How can he hope to accomplish this without undoing the postulate of self-referentiality which defines and delimits for him the specificity of literature? ... The precision and the resourcefulness of his analyses make him into a model case for examining if and how the poetics of literary form can be made compatible with the hermeneutics of reading. More is at stake in this than the didactics of literary instruction or the possiblity of literary history; at stake, first and foremost, is the category of the aesthetic as guardian of the rational cognition it appears to subvert and, beyond this, the destiny of cognition itself as it runs the risk of having to confront texts without the shelter of aesthetic distance. (30-31) In this selection, as in the previous one, de Man treats phenomenology and hermeneutics as a single 21 category in order to argue that language can never, finally, be adequated to human experience or understanding. Here, however, he is interested in the way in which the literary monument organizes a central i contradiction. Because the monument "exists quite independently of its beholder,” because— like language in the first passage— it is inhuman, it "shelters” by i . . . . excluding or distancing rational cognition. Here, then, is the second point with which I take exception. As will become clear, the grounds for my ! i \ objection will turn upon the identification of figures and their poetic intertexts. When de Man argues that "at stake, first and foremost, is the category of the i aesthetic as guardian of the rational cognition it | appears to subvert and, beyond this, the destiny of ^ cognition itself as it runs the risk of having to j confront texts without the shelter of aesthetic distance," he presents his argument in terms that invite pause. There is, to my ear, something poetic, mysterious, even unfathomable, about the descriptive nouns "guardian" and "shelter." They are not easily identifiable as the nouns or things they claim to be; both irresistably move in the direction of the verb: both suggest that they do what they describe. Moreover, what they do is surprising: they shelter and guard what they exclude. Both are irresistably directed toward rational cognition and not toward the irrational play of poetic language. The movement that I point to is not considered by de Man. It is, however, a movement that stages the doubleness that the compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics requires; it is also a movement that we have i seen before on a different stage— one belonging to Kina Lear and Shakespeare. My objection is that, in formulating his conception | of the relation of the aesthetic to rational cognition, j de Man has not attended to the most celebrated poetic intertext of his own argument. He has not attended to the language that is performed in Kina Lear— language that performs the very compatibility imagined as a possible threat to the destiny of rational cognition. Let me, then, return to one of the most often rehearsed passage in the play: No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds i1th1 cage. When thou dost ask of me my blessing, 1111 kneel down And ask of thee forgiveness. So we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues 23 Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too— Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out— And take upon's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies; and we'll wear out, In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones That ebb and flow by th' moon. (Kina Lear. V, III, 9-19) My point in returning to Lear's naked and impassioned plea to Cordelia is, first, that of associating literary representation with the question of aesthetic shelter and, second, of associating the literary text with the closed space of the aesthetic monument. In addition, however, I am interested in the association of both aesthetic shelter and monumental closure with a history figured as a female body. Who lives to "sing like birds," or bards, is defined by the formal constraints of literary genres, by "who's in"— i'th'cage," "In a walled prison," in the presence of Cordelia. I want to suggest that the play figures Cordelia's body as the cage or walled prison in which poetic texts can be read and written. That is to say, the figure of her body is the figure of the generic constraints that give poetic expression form. Lear is not the only character in the play to understand the female body as the site of an aesthetic shelter. His plea is preceded by the doctor's. Again, 24 it is addressed to Cordelia: "Desire him to go in." This time, the plea is associated with the question of Lear's sanity, with finding an "in"/inn to shelter rational cognition: Be comforted, good madam. The great rage You see is killed in him; [and yet it is danger To make him even o'er the time he has lost.] Desire him to go in. Trouble him no more Till further settling. (IV, vii, 81- 85) Shakespeare's Kina Lear offers us a representation of "inns." Collectively, they organize a relation between rationalism, aesthetic monumentality, historicism, and the figuration of the female body. In particular, it is a play that offers us an exemplary "inn" within whose shelter we can question the tradition in which the desire to represent "the mystery of things"— to talk, to laugh, to sing, to pray, to tell old tales— has been predicated on the figuration of the past, the memory of the past, and the histories we write about the past as female bodies. In formulating a response to de Man, then, I want to look closely at one very particular example of generic closure in the play— that structured by the heroic couplets with which Kina Lear begins and ends; that which is structured as the walled prison and cage of generic convention but not at the expense of demanding that the female body be figured as history. I am referring to Kent’s final lines in Act I, scene i and to Albany's, Kent's, and Edgar's final lines in Act V, scene iii: Kent Fare thee well, King. Sith thus thou wilt appear, Freedom lives hence, and banishment is here. [To Cordelia] The gods to their dear shelter take thee, maid That justly think'st and hast most rightly said. [To Regan and Goneril] And your large speeches may your deeds approve, That good effects may spring from words of love. Thus Kent, O princes, bids you all adieu; He'11 shape his old course in a country new. (I,i,130-137) Albany ...Friends of my soul, you twain Rule in this realm, and the gored state sustain. Kent I have a journey, sir, shortly to go. My master calls me? I must not say no. Edgar The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest hath borne most? we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long. (V,iii,320-327) Throughout the play, language resists the aesthetic closure and control of generic form: meter and rhyme are powerless to regulate the plot-— rather than moving from fall to reversal and purgation, the play advances only as a descent into one monstrous, irrational banishment and death after another, one monstrous lie and silence after another. Language does not bow to the demands of a hermeneutic quest for truth in King Lear; words do not contain matter; language is powerless to express intent. No one makes these points more painfully clear than Goneril when she says, "Sir, I love you more than word can weild the matter” (I,ii,55) or Cordelia when she says "Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/My heart into my mouth" (I,ii,92). Nevertheless, in the two passages of heroic couplets that I have quoted, language does do something that it can not do elsewhere. It fashions itself in a form that secures an aesthetic distance without conceiving of that aesthetic distance as a figuration of Cordelia*s body. The introduction of generic control in the first of the two passages comes at a significant point of transition in the play: Kent has been banished by Lear; what we read are the lines with which he makes his exit. I want, then, to emphasize two points. (1) the context in which the lines are spoken is defined by Xvent*s inability to use language to reveal intent, Goneril's and Regan's ability to use language to conceal intent, and Lear's inability to understand the complex relation of language and intent. (2) The lines promise that the "banishment" will result in a transition and not in a break. Speaking of himself in the third person, Kent says: "He'll shape his old course in a country new." We know from the play that a "country new" refers to a language new. Kent will continue to wait upon his master, but henceforth, he will abandon his attempts to master a hermeneutics of language and to transfer this mastery to Lear. His attendance upon Lear will assume a poetic form. His speech will assume the irrationality of poetic play. ^ What Kent promises to organize, then, is a figure in which a poetics and a hermeneutics of language will be rendered compatible. What he understands is that without I this compatibility there is no "freedom," that "freedom lives outside the boundaries of a hermeneutic circle, a closed monument, or the figuration of time as a woman's womb, that the relation between language and intent can't I be understood until one "banishes" the demand that language, history, and female bodies be figured, or disfigured, as monuments capable of sheltering rational cognition. I want to argue that it is the aesthetic distance of the heroic couplets that enables Kent's ability to imagine the compatibility in the first scene of the play. I also want to argue that, by the final scene of the play, we are able to see that the aesthetic distance of the couplets does not function as de Man suggested they might. The distance does not shelter rational cognition by protecting "what lies beyond the realm of the poetic from the shameful goings on that occur within its boundaries" (any more than the gods are able to "shelter" Cordelia from death). The distance does not shelter cognition by protecting "the rational world from poetry's bad example" (de Man 30). Rather, it passes between the boundaries that separate the random, irrational play of poetic trope from the ordered, measured knowledge of hermeneutic quest. And this is why the final lines of the play fail to provide anything more, or less, than the appearance of closure. In so far as Kent and Edgar have been the two characters capable of imagining a compatibility of a poetics and hermeneutics, they are the two into whose trust the "gored state" may be placed. The indeterminate meaning of their final lines, in tandem with the purposeful intent with which they serve the masters who simultaneously condemn and call them, render their texts unlike any others in the play. It is because the closure of the end rhymes belies the marriage of language to intent, a poetics to a hermeneutics, that the play can end with such a courageous, and threatening, affirmation of the compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics of language; it is because the strictly regulated meter of the heroic couplets contradicts Edgar*s claim ("We must...speak what we feel, not what we ought to say") that the play is able to end with such a courageous, and threatening, affirmation of the compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics of language; and finally, it is because, the aesthetic shelter of generic convention is no longer required to labor under the inhuman weight of figurations that deprive women of their own bodies— as tragically as Cordelia is deprived of her own body— that the play can end with such a courageous, and threatening, affirmation of the compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics of language. 1 Notes (Introduct i on) 1 I am referring to Dante Alighieri*s celebrated Letter to Can Grande della Scala. He writes: 9. Now the form is twofold, the form of the treatise and the form of the treatment. The form of the treatise is threefold, according to its threefold division. The first division is that by which the whole work is divided into three cantiche; the second that whereby each cantica is divided into cantos; the third, that whereby each canto is divided into lines. The form or method of treatment is poetic, fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive; and likewise proceeding by definition, division, proof, refutation, and setting forth of examples. I cite P.H. Wicksteed's translation, Translations of the Later Works of Dante. I am referring to Roland Barthes's well rehearsed distinction between writerly and readerly texts. In S/Z he writes: Notre evaluation ne peut etre liee qu'a une pratique et cette pratique est celle de l'ecriture. II y,a d'un cote ce qu'il est possible d'ecrire et de 1*autre ce qu'il n'est plus possible d'ecrire: ce qui est dans la pratique de l'ecrivain et ce qui en est sorti: quels textes accepterais-je d'ecrire (de re-ecrire) de desirer, d'avancer comme une force dans ce monde qui est le mien? Ce que 1'evaluation trouve, c'est cette valeur- ci: ce qui peut etre aujourd'hui ecrit (re-ecrit: le scriotible. Pourquoi le scriptible est-il notre valeur? Parce que l'enjeu du travail litteraire (de la litterature comme travail), c'est de 31 faire du lecteur, non plus un consonunateur, mais un producteur du texte. [...] En face du texte scriptible s'etablit done sa contrevaleur, sa valeur negative, reactive: ce qui peut etre lu, mais non ecrit: le lisible. Nous appelons classique tout texte lisible. [Our evaluation can be linked only to a practice, and this practice is that of writing. On the one hand, there is what it is possible to write, and on the other, what it is no longer possible to write: what is within the practice of the writer and what has left it: which texts would I consent to write (to re write) , to desire, to put forth as a force in this world of mine? What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: the writerlv. Why is the writerly so valuable to us? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. [...] Opposite the writerly text, then, is its countervalue, its negative, reactive value: what can be read, but not written: the readerlv. We call any readerly text a classic text.] Divorced from a poetics of language, a hermeneutics of language merely consumes the text. It is, therefore, the possibility of a simultaneous act of production and consumption that I want to pose? for, as Marx notes in the Eighteenth Brumaire. texts, like Hmen[,] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past." It is, therefore, in the interest of the possiblity of writing , today that the simultaneous consumption and production of the text takes place. — — — — — ‘ . — — — - - - - - - 32 3 Of the many studies on the essay that I have found useful, Elizabeth Bruss's Beautiful Theories is, perhaps the most outstanding. 4 In Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Schiller writes: "Man is more than a match for any of nature's terrors once he knows how to give it form and convert it into an object of his contemplation." Schiller takes his model for such mastery and conversion from the Greeks who "combined the first youth of imagination with the manhood of reason in a glorious manifestation of humanity." With the Greeks, the mind did indeed divide human nature into its several aspects, and project these in magnified form into the divinities of its glorious pantheon; but not by tearing it to pieces; rather by combining its aspects in different proportions, for in no single one of their deities was humanity in its entirety ever lacking. How different with us moderns! With us too the image of the human species is projected in magnified form into separate individuals— but as fragments, not in different combinations, with the result that one has to go the rounds from one individual to another in order to be able to piece together a complete image of the species. With us, one might almost be tempted to assert, the various faculties appear as separate in practice as they are distinguished by the psychologist in theory, and we see not merely individuals, but whole classes of men, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain. The desire and will to put a "humanist's face" on "nature's terrors" leads to a theory of synthetic transcendence that is not able to accommodate a convergence of contradictions or differences. 33 Chapter I "The Style is the Text Itself": Michael Riffaterre and the Rude Mechanical's Performance When Paul de Man joined Michael Riffaterre's name with Dominique Ingres's in "Hypogram and Inscription," he did not have in mind Baudelaire's condemnatory remarks in "Le peintre de la vie moderne": ...le grand defaut de M. Ingres, en particulier, est de vouloir imposer a chaque type qui pose sous son oeil un perfectionnement plus ou moins complet, c'est-a-dire plus ou moins despotique, emprunte au repertoire des idees classiques" ["The Painter of Modern Life": "...the great failing of M. Ingres, in particular, is to want to impose, on each type who sits before his eye, a perfectionism more or less complete, that is to say, more or less despotic, the imprint of the repertory of classical ideas] (554). De Man strikes the comparison in an essay which remains | today both the most sympathetic and respectful as well as \ the most probing and disturbing of evaluations of textual analysis? it reads ; [Michael Riffaterre's] work is like that of a scientist or, rather, of a techni cian addressing other technicians ... . One reads his masterful, witty, learned and altogether enlightened papers with considerable pleasure, but it is like the pleasure one derives from a f - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 34 drawing by Ingres, say, rather than from Le Radeau de la Meduse. (28) De Man doesn't return to the analogy? he employs it in order to point to the apparent distance between Riffaterre's work and issues of public controversy or social relevancy. It is, however, worth pursuing. For despite the two centuries which separate them, one might well say of Riffaterre what Walter Friedlaender has written of Ingres: his work fell within a period in which romantic sentiment and romantic art were preponderant and basic ... . And so [his] classicism was necessarily influenced in an essential way by the romantic point of view of his time. The result was a romantic classicism— in which romantic, irrational, and anticlassical elements...penetrate and modify in a particular way the general tone of rational classicism. (72) Like Ingres before him, Riffaterre stands at a crossroads defined by the rational, on the one hand, and the irrational, on the other. Each respectively expresses himself in explicit response to David's and Jakobson's influence; each values, as the highest form of aesthetic expression, the technical precision of rational classicism and structuralist poetics. Yet, neither will jettison the irrational, the emotional, or the sensuous from his expressions of that aesthetic. Ingres, for example, will throw Venus's head back in pain 35 and droop her wounded hand from an outstretched arm in Venus Wounded bv Diomedes; he will paint with a voluptuous redundancy the voyeuristically imposed erect nipples of the bathers1s breasts in The Turkish Bath. Riffaterre will define the literary text, after the words of Andre Breton, as "une debacle de 1*intellect" [a debacle of the intellect] (La Production 8); he will choose the complicity of the beautiful and the monstrously irrational in Baudelaire's "Hymne a la Beaute" ["Hymn to Beauty"] as the paradigmatic example of matrical and hypogrammatic overdetermination in the Semiotics of Poetry (23-25). The parallels are highly suggestive. They might well serve as the springboard from which a study of the relation of eighteenth century French classicism and twentieth century French structuralism would begin. They do not in themselves, however, define the concerns of the present study. For my interest in the comparison has not only to do with Ingres's and Riffaterre's mutual passion for technical precision but with the disruption that such passion causes in Riffaterre's theory. When we reread "Hypogram and Inscription" with the comparison in mind, we find that it troubles the very concerns which, de Man argues, summarize the stakes of Riffaterre's work: The precision and resourcefulness of j [Riffaterre1s] analyses make him into a j model case for examining if and how the poetics of literary form can be made I compatible with the hermeneutics of I reading. More is at stake in this than the didactics of literary instruction or j the possibility of literary history? at stake, first and foremost, is the category of the aesthetic as guardian of the rational cognition it appears to subvert and, beyond this, the destiny of cognition itself as it runs the risk of having to confront texts without the shelter of aesthetic distance. (31) The association of Riffaterre with Ingres implies that what is finally at stake in textual analysis is something only partially articulated in this passage. Thus, while I want to acknowledge an indebtedness to de Man * s inquiry I I into both (1) the relation between a poetics of literary I form and a hermeneutics of reading as well as (2) the j relation between aesthetic categories or boundaries and i I ! rational cognition, I also want to say that the i comparison of Ingres and Riffaterre reminds us that the significance of textual analysis derives not from philosophy, not even from literary theory, but from the I uniqueness of its "drawings." j The question that I will pose in the following pages, I . i I then, is organized by the style of Riffaterre1s literary i i interpretations. It will ask: what happens to the ! i literary text when it is interpreted by a writer who believes in its monstrous irrationality but who, at the 37 same time, is committed to preserving aesthetic expression as a guard or shelter for rational cognition? Were it not for the persuasive power of Riffaterre's interpretations, such a question might tempt us toward a facile response: what happens, we might be willing to argue, is that the literary text is made to appear a rational, stable, and overdetermined structure, naive in its monumentality. It is made out to be a machine— little more than a word puzzle or a riddle. Riffaterre, himself, we might argue, does more than invite these responses with claims such as 1 1 Le texte fonctionne comme le programme d'un ordinateur..." [the text functions like a computer program] (La Production 8) ? "Le texte est un code limitatif et prescriptif" [the text is a limiting and prescriptive code! (La Production 11)? or "...the text1s hold on the reader1s attention is so strong that even his absent-mindedness or, in later eras, his I estrangement from the aesthetic reflected in the poem or | its genre, cannot quite obliterate the poem's features or their power to control his decoding" (Semiotics 21-22). Such a response, however, does not account for the strength of the interpretations and, as even so critical a reader as Jonathan Culler has written, "...the interpretations are so engaging that one cannot wish them eliminated" (99). 38 The analyses preclude an easy dismissal. What I propose, therefore, is a consideration of Riffaterre's work that takes the style of the interpretations themselves as its primary subject, that asks what the interpretations do by asking how they do it, and that is based neither on their application of a theory of literature nor on their illustration of a philosophy of asesthetics or cognition but on their stylistic performance of the interpretive act— a performance that, we shall see, does what it can't say, theorize, or philosophize and that, so doing, blurs the boundaries that define and stabilize the category of the aesthetic while, at the same time, making claims for the monumental inviolability of the literary text. I will begin by postulating a definition of the stylistic performance. The stylistic performance staged by textual analysis is organized as a competition of three discourses— the banal. the technical or theoretic, and the poetic ? it is organized as a competition that persists in a single textual figure. typically a cliche but always a construction that is recognized by any native speaker as a performance of act which. to cruote Jacoue Barzun. the cliche1s name indicates: the click of the metal plate as it reproduces the same image mechanically without end. (4) In the pages which follow, I will examine this performance, first, in the context of Riffaterre's general description of textual analysis— his description of the interpretive goal— and then, in the context of his analysis of Balzac's La Paix du menage, a story written in 1829 and collected in Scenes de la vie privee. In both cases, the text on which I will draw will be Riffaterre's La Production du texte. I THE BANAL REFERENT In the description of textual analysis that Riffaterre presents in the opening pages of La Production du texte, we find a cliched expression, je ne sais guoi, that both disturbs the analytic text's claim to technical rigor and functions as a feature that organizes the contradiction and competition of banal, technical*and poetic discourses. Riffaterre writes: II faut...renverser la vapeur et aller dans la direction de 1'unique, de ce j_e ne sais guoi dont on nous avertit charitablement qu'il n'est accessible que par une operation mystique. C'est ici que 1'analyse formelle demontre son utilite, ne serait-ce que parce qu'elle permet de decrire les faits avec 40 precision. En me fondant sur cette analyse, je veux proposer une definition du phenomene litteraire. Elle devrait montrer combien 1'explication traditionnelle fait fausse route. [It1s necessary to reverse steam and move in the direction of the unique, of this je ne sais cruoi which we have been charitably warned is accessible only through a mystical operation. This is where formal analysis demonstrates its utility, if only because it permits us to describe the facts with precision. Laying my foundations on this analysis, I want to propose a definition of the literary phenomenon. It should show how traditional explication has taken the wrong path.] (9) The phrase je ne sais cruoi runs throughout French literature in the seventeenth century. As E.B.O. Borgerhoff has argued in The Freedom of French Classicism, the contradiction illuminated by its recurrent introduction of "the indefinable" into "the rationalistic aspect of Classic literary sensibility," illuminates, in its turn, "the complexity and vitality" of a period in French literature which is otherwise too often reduced to "the establishment of rules for literary composition" (vii-xi). Riffaterre's importation of the phrase certainly resonates with the persistence of this complexity, but his definition does not depend upon the reader's familiarity with it. What the definition does rely upon is the reader's affective reaction to the je ne sais cruoi— his or her perception of its semantic 41 banality. For Riffaterre*s principal concern is with how language draws the reader*s attention: only after attracting our attention can the je ne sais cruoi hope to remind us that the phrase has both a technical as well as a poetic something about it. THE TECHNICAL REFERENT In the context of the description of textual analysis, the je ne sais cruoi points to its banality at the very moment that it ensures, what Paul de Man has termed, Riffaterre*s identity as **a technician addressing other technicians." In addition to alluding to a convention of French classicism, the phrase alludes to Roman Jakobson's "A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry." It resonates with Riffaterre*s charge against Jakobson— whose "narrow, rigorous methods... could never catch the subtle, indefinable je ne sais cruoi that poetry is supposed to be made of" ("Describing Poetic Structures" 213; "A Postscript" 24) as well as with Jakobson*s rejoinder— * * [Rif faterre * s] jLe ne sais cruoi remains equally elusive in the scientific study of language, or of society, of life, and even of the ultimate physical secrets of matter. It is quite useless to oppose pretentiously the je ne sais guoi to the insuperable approximations of science" ("A Postscript" 24). The emphasis Riffaterre places on literature as a phenomenon, 42 an experience accessible to the senses (Mje veux proposer une definition du phenomene litteraire" [I want to propose a defintion of the literary phenomenon]) accounts for his use of an expression which, by contradicting its context, calls attention to its material presence: when we trace the expression back through the polemics of the arguments advanced in "Describing Poetic Structures," we find that the je ne sais cruoi is employed to evoke the phenomenological argument advanced against Jakobson, whose "esprit de creometrie" is said to fail in its attempt to describe "the subtle, indefinable je ne sais guoi" because, as a grammar, it does not account for the phenomenal materiality of the sign. (213) Riffaterre takes exception to Jakobson*s theory precisely because it "superimposes abstract, relational systems upon the concrete, lexical material" of the poetry it treats while failing to account for the "features" of a text which "are designed to draw responses from the reader" (213- 214) . THE POETIC REFERENT Not only does the je ne sais cruoi point to Riffaterre*s technical exchange with Jakobson, but in complicity with the preceding figure, renverser la vapeur, it echoes with the language of the well rehearsed dictum of Arthur Rimbaud*s Lettres du vovant. Both "il faut...renverser la vapeur et aller 43 dans la direction de 1'unique" and "il s'agit d 'arriver a 1'inconnu par le dereglement de tous les sens: [it's a question of arriving at the unknown through the derangement of all the senses] (Oeuvres 2 68) are organized by a single meaning: changer totalement une facon d'aair. With only slight variations, the former echoes with the latter: il faut... il s'agit d' aller arriver dans la direction de 1'unique a 1'inconnu de ce j_e ne sais guoi et...renverser [et] deregie[r]... la vapeur tous les sens In tandem with the description of the literary experience, presented one page earlier in La production I du texte, the description of textual analysis invites us j I to read it as a semantic variation on the Rimbaldien idea j of escape from the limitations of habitual perception, the fausse route of the traditional, and the search for the unknown: "...le propre de 1'experience litteraire, j c'est d'etre un depaysement, un exercice d'alienation, un j i bouleversement de nos pensees, de nos perceptions, de nos expressions habituelles" [That which is proper to the literary experience is its being a disorientation, an exercise in alienation, a violent disordering of our thoughts, of our perceptions, of our habitual 44 expressions] (8). One heads in the direction of the literary, the unique, the 1 1 je ne sais quoi," by "reversing steam" and experiencing the literary phenomenon— which is to say, after Rimbaud, a "dereglement de tous les sens" that disorients, alienates, and defamiliarizes sensual, phenomenal experience. The poetic intertext is perceived because the phrase ie ne sais auoi disrupts the analytic rigor of the discourse. As a cliche, it seems scarcely adequate to the demands of the technically precise discourse in which it is embedded? it seems better suited to a discourse of bourgeois ignorance such as Swann attributes to tantes Celine and Flora in Proust's A la recherche du temps ' perdu (1.24-26) or as is spoken by Bouvard and Pecuchet in the novel which Flaubert organizes as a Dictionnaire des idees recues. Perceived as anomalous to its context, the banality of the cliche effectively draws the response requisite to the deralement by which the intertexts tell us that textual analysis moves toward the unique. The cliche disrupts the discourse and creates a contradiction or paradox which might be stated in terms of the following formulation: while textual analysis says one thing— analysis must move toward the unique or poetic— it 45 does another: moves toward the banal, the technical. and the poetic at once. In other words, while textual analysis says that it is moving toward a literary text which it identifies as a monument (...plus le texte est monumental..., plus il est litteraire [the more a text is monumental, the more it is literary] (La Production 98)), it does so by blurring the distinctions between literary, technical, and everyday languages, by blurring the very boundaries which allow the aesthetic to guard or shelter rational cognition. For although the disparate discourses of textual anlaysis can be distinguished one from the other, they can only be separated in the context of their inevitable collapse into a single textual feature— in this case, the habitual, mechanical expression or the cliche. The confusion of distinctions is all the more determined by the fact that in structuring the discourse of textual analysis, Riffaterre has employed the very techniques and features which, according to his claims, define "the subtle, indefinable je ne sais quoi of poetry": textual analysis no less than poetry relies upon (1) "indirections"— the quintessential technique of poetry ("...poetry expresses concepts and things by indirection. To put it simply, a poem says one thing and means another" rSemiotics 1]) as well as (2) the 46 "cliche"— a textual feature that, in literary prose, organizes a paradox that is perceived as an expressive and, therefore, poetic agent by virtue of its banality: Le cliche presente ce paradoxe d'etre un agent d'expressivite, a cause des caracteristiques memes qui font que la critique le considere comme un defaut. ...il permet des contrastes qui seraient impossibles avec un contexte moins caracterise. Quelle que soit 1 * importance du renouvellement du cliche, pour jouer le role actif d'un contraste /createur d'expressivite, n'a nul besoin d'etre renouvele, puisque c'est la perception de sa banalite meme qui lui permet de jouer ce role. [The cliche presents the paradox of being an expressive agent by virtue of the very characteristics that make criticism consider it vacuous. ...it permits contrasts that would be impossible with a less well defined context. The importance of rediscovering the cliche as a source of stylistic originality would be that of allowing it to play the active role of an expressive, creative contrast— there is, however, no need to renovate it since it is the perception of its very banality that permits it to play this role.] (Essais de stvlisticrue structurale 180-81) The more attentive the reader is to the placement and function of poetic techniques and features— of poetic indirection and cliches— in textual analysis, the clearer their centrality to the treatment of literature becomes. Each time that Riffaterre turns from theoretical claims to specific literary texts, he does so under the steam of 47 a cliche, a mechanical metaphor, that "says” one thing and "means" (or does) another. I take as an example Riffaterre*s extended analysis of Balzac*s short story La Paix du menage. the ninth chapter of La Production du texte. Prefacing a summary of the story with an explanation of his attraction to it, i Riffaterre writes: [La] brievete [de La Paix du menage1 me convient, car les etroites limites dans lesquelles 1 * intrigue doit se derouler donnent a ce petit roman quelque chose de schematique, qui fait ressortir le caractere de mecanique bien huilee de ses episodes. L*imbroglio est a la fois complique et facile a debrouiller. II a une ccclarte didactique» qui a seduit les connaisseurs et ou les critiques ont voulu voir un emprunt de roman aux techniques de la scene... . L1intrigue et le denouement...ont le ton de la comedie legere: ... . (155) [The brevity of The Peace of the Household suits me, because the narrow limits in which the plot must unfold give to this little novel something of the schematic, which throws into relief the way its episodes assume the character of a well-oiled machine. The imbroglio is at once complicated and easy to untangle. The novel has a "didactic clarity" in which connoisseurs and critics have i wanted to see the imprint of stage techniques... . The plot and denouement...have the tone of light comedy: ... .] THE BANAL REFERENT Once again, the banality of a cliche is introduced into the technical description: we are told that the complicated misunderstandings of the plot— its imbroglio— are easy to untangle, that the episodes work together like the parts of a "well-oiled machine." But, as in both literary prose as well as the description of technical analysis, the cliche organizes a paradox: it is a mechanical metaphor; it resonates with both theoretic and poetic discourses. THE TECHNICAL REFERENT In the explanantion of his attraction to Balzac* s story, la mecanicrue bien huilee functions as a metaphoric allusion to textual analysis itself. The cliche points to a variety of ways, in both Semiotics of Poetry and La Production du texte, in which Riffaterre has equated textual analysis with mechanical precision. Words themselves, he argues, exist in our minds only because they group together to form automatic, mechanical associations: Avant meme d * etre encodes dans un texte, les mots n * existent qu * en groupes dans 1*esprit du locuteur; ils y forment des sequences associatives d*une remarquable rigidite. Beaucoup de noms ne s*emploient qu'avec des adjectifs et des verbes qui actualisent leurs semes implicites. Des phrases entieres deviennent des cliches parce qu*elles contiennent un fait de style qui vaut la peine d'etre conserve. [Even before being encoded within a text, words exist in the mind of the reader only in groups; there they form remarkably rigid associative sequences. A lot of nouns are only employed with 49 adjectives and verbs that actualize their semantic implications. Entire sentences become cliches because they contain a textual feature which is deemed worth preserving.] (La Production 90) The literary text, itself, is described in terms of the mechanical when Riffaterre introduces the postulate on which all of his analyses, from the Semiotics of Poetry onward, are grounded: poetry, he argues, results from the transformation and actualization of a hypothetical matrix, a minimal and literal sentence, into j successive variants; the form of these variants is governed by a model— which, in turn, governs the form of the hvpogram (Semiotics 19). It is on the authority of ! i the matrix and its variants that Riffaterre will claim that "comme le programme d'un ordinateur...le texte litteraire est construit de maniere a controler son j propre decodage" [like the computer program, the literary text is constructed in such a way as to control its own decoding] (La Production 11) . Thus, while la mecanicrue bien huilee points back to Riffaterre's claims for the literary text's self-defined and monumental closure, it t performs that closure in terms of the cliche's stylistic disruption. Within the assertion "the brevity of La Paix du menage gives to the little novel something of the schematic..." is not only the overdetermination, the mechanical rigidity, of habitual semantic associations 50 but "the rediscovery of the cliche as a source of stylistic originality"— its ability to preserve the unique, the poetic, from the threat of either the exclusively technical or the exclusively banal. THE POETIC REFERENT As in the description of textual analysis, the contradiction and competition of banal and technical discourses is heightened by the resonance of a poetic text within the cliche. Tracing the contours of its own figure in order to point to the paradox of "an expressive contrast," la mecanioue bien huilee becomes confused with the dramatic and onomatopoeic tangle of the noun that follows it: "11 imbroglio." The theatrical context of the tangle— implicit in the term imbroglio and emphasized, at the end of Riffaterre1s summary, by the reference to readers who see in the plot the imprint of stage techniques and hear the tone of light comedy— reshapes the figure of the machine: la mecanicrue bien huilee. points to both | theatrical machinery as well as theatrical mechanics— J and, as we will see, to the most well-oiled mechanical in I literature, Bottom— whose "speech," like the imbroglio of the plot, "[is] like a tangled chain; nothing impaired, but all disordered" (A Midsummer Night1s Dream V,i, 134-135). 51 When we read through the chapter-long interpretation j of La Paix du menage with the Shakespearean intertext in I mind, we see that without ever directly invoking the name ! of the play or the mechanical, Riffaterre has employed both to structure an argument that foregrounds the narrative * s variations on four of the themes that Bottom organizes in A Midsummer Night1s Dream. Or, to be more specific, Riffaterre employs both to foreground themes that, in the Semiotics of Poetry, he argues that Bottom organizes: — the transformation of man into beast; the moral of the transformation as the folly of love; the frenzy of infatuation and the blindness of passion; the emptiness or unworthiness of the object of this passion. Thus, in his treatment of A Midsummer Night1s Dream, Riffaterre writes: "... [the] fabulous tale of man transformed into beast... serves, on the Shakespeare model, as a conventional code in whose ad hoc dictionary any word describing animality substituted for humanness I will mean the folly of love" (102) . And, in his analysis ' • of La Paix du menage, he argues that the verbal construction "s1approchait en papillonant" substituted for "un verbe...compatible avec des connotations judiciaires" transforms the magistrate into a butterfly "parfaitement grotesque" and leads "le lecteur [a voir] dans le roman une comedie des sottises que 1*amour fait 52 commettre [...he approached like a butterfly, substituted for a verb...compatible with judiciary connotations, both transforms the magistrate into a perfectly grotesque butterfly and leads the reader to see in the novel a comedy of the follies that love makes people commit] (160). He argues, in the analysis of Shakespeare's comedy, that "Bottom's asininity...is born of Titania's infatuation" with an "unworthy object" and "symbolizes passion's blindness" (102) while arguing, in the analysis of Balzac's comedy, that the magistrate's grotesque fluttering is born of "1'engouement des femmes pour les militaires" [the infatuation of the women with the soldiers] and results in the description of him, in the company of all these militaires. as a comic, internally empty object of desire symbolizing "la duperie universelle de 1'amour, la tricherie des passions [the universal dupery of love, the tricks of the passions] (158; 161). Finally, in the Semiotics of Poetry, he presents the story as a comedy about the metonymic ' metamorphoses that spring from the passions, guaranteeing "que chaque objet decrit est le signe de quelque chose d'autre" [that each object described is the sign of something else] (158-162). If we now return to the context in which la mecanicrue bien huilee is introduced, we see that the 53 cliche's three discursive voices speak with the counterpoint of a theatrical imbroglio to tell us that if, according to the technical referent, textual analysis is an overdetermined, closed, and monumental machine, it is also, according to the poetic referent, a theatrical machine— a theatrical production that faces, as does A Midsummer Night's Dream, the banalities of the commonplace with the expressive terms of the "subtle, indefinable j_e ne sais quoi" of the unique and literary. Why though, we must now ask, does the comedic, poetic intertext enter Riffaterre's interpretation of Balzac's story as indirectly as the Rimbaldien intertext entered the description of textual analysis? The elaborate indirection by which Balzac's narrative is read as a variation of Shakespeare's play— by which the i soldiers are read as variations of Bottom, the women's | i . | infatuation as blindness and the transformation of the < i | monstrous as a conventional necessity— seems curious. j I I While Balzac's general attraction to Shakespearean models | i certainly establishes a precedent for a direct comparison, the echo of Oberon's final lines in the very I title of La Paix du menage renders such an association j unavoidable: "Through this house each fairy stray/.../ j and each several chamber bless,/...with sweet peace" (V,i, 391-407). 54 The indirection is accounted for by the fact that within the analysis the intertext belongs not to Balzac*s story, but to the cliche, the mechanical metaphor in textual analysis. To ask why textual analysis must represent its own intertexts with such indirection, I will return to the poetic referent of la mecanicrue bien huilee. As I have demonstrated above, the cliche not only alludes to the mechanical*s imbroglio in A Midsummer Night * s Dream, it alludes to Riffaterre*s own treatment of the play in the Semiotics of Poetry. If we question the context in which Shakespeare *s mechanical is analyzed in the Semiotics of Poetry, we find that it involves yet another intertext. Bottom enters the analysis of A Midsummer Night * s Dream inside an analysis of Arthur Rimbaud*s "Bottom,**— a prose poem from Illuminations in which the narrating voice is metonymically metamorphosed into a "gros oiseau gris-bleue, * ' "un gros ours aux I gencives violettes," and finally, an "ahe" [...a large I i I gray-blue bird? a large bear with violet gums; an ass.] Paradoxically, Shakespeare's rude mechanical, the monster with whom Puck's mistress is in love, enters Riffaterre's analysis of Rimbaud's poem as the only figure whose regulated, staged disfigurement "enables us to make some sense of the narrator's [metonymic] metamorphoses"— the 55 dereqlement of the poem (101). The poetic intertext of la mecanicrue bien huilee refers the reader first to Shakespeare's rude mechanical, then to Riffaterre's treatment of the character in Semiotics of Poetry. and finally, to the context of that treatment— an analysis of Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem, "Bottom." However circuitously, the cliche introduces both Shakespeare's and Rimbaud's Bottoms into Riffaterre's explanation of his attraction to Balzac's narrative: or more pointedly, the cliche introduces into the explanation the monstrous, H metonymic metamorphoses which the two commonly organize. Both the Rimbaldian and Shakespearean intertexts present the poetic in the context of a monstrous metamorphosis. And, it is this monstrosity, this monstrosity of the poetic, which necessitates an indirect presentation. For poetry, the literary texts upon which all of textual analysis is grounded, is understood by Riffaterre as a metonymic metamorphosis which is monstrous in its ability to disorient, alienate, and disorder perception. Again, the formulation is Rimbaud's: the monstrous is conflated with the dereqlement de tous les sens and the two are made synonymous with the poetic in the Lettres du vovant— the poetic intertext of Riffaterre's description of textual analysis. The letter of 13 mai 56 1871, in which Rimbaud writes, "II s'agit d'arriver a 11inconnu par le dereglement de tous les sens," is supplemented by the letter of 15 mai 1871 where he writes: "La premiere etude de l'homme qui veut etre poete est sa propre connaissance entiere; ... . — Mais il s'agit de faire l'ame monstrueuse: ..." [The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of his entire self; ... . — But it's a question of making the soul monstrous] (Rimbaud 270). For Riffaterre, like Rimbaud, metonymy is the trope with which the search for la connaissance entiere— whether it is of the poem or of the self— begins. Thus, in the prose poem "Bottom," the contiguous relation between the blue-gray bird, the bear with violet gums, and the ass promises the poet an escape from a reality "trop epineuse" [too prickly] into a poetic reality where he can know his entire self? and thus, in the Semiotics of Poetry, "nothing better demonstrates... than metonymy...to what extent the representation of reality in poetry is used to point indirectly" to the connaissance of an other, poetic reality (58-9). For Riffaterre, unlike Rimbaud, however, the dereqlement of metonymic association poses a threat to understanding all the while that it initiates it: in order for a reader to arrive at la connaissance entiere of a poem, he must 57 read its metonymies as transformations and semantic actualizations of the text's matrix and hypogrammatic variants; he must read them as part of a machine which controls its own decoding. As we know, for Rimbaud such a transformation commits the poet to a prison of material reality that he cannot bear. In "Bottom," this prison takes the form of a metaphoric transformation of the metonymic dereqlement: the poet becomes Shakespeare's rude mechanical waited upon, not by fairies able to "purge [his] mortal grossness so/ That [he] shalt like an airy spirit go" (IIIri,145-6) but by those who are conquered, by "les Sabines de la banlieue [qui] vinrent se jeter a [son] poitrail" [the suburban Sabines [who] 1 come to hurl themselves upon [his] chest] (Rimbaud 2 02). The problem which textual analysis faces, then, is one of its relation to the metonymic monstrosity of the literary texts it interprets. The question to which it must respond is how an analysis can express the monstrosity of the literary or poetic without assuming its face— without assuming the monstrous likeness of either the poet who "s'implant[e] et se cultiv[e] des verrues sur le visage [implants and cultivates warts on his face] (Rimbaud 270) or the mechanical who grows "marvellous hairy about the face" (Shakespeare IV,i,24). How, without assuming the metonymic complexion of the 58 literary, does an analysis address the poetic? This is the question to which the cliche responds. If we can now return to the proposal with which I began this study, we can see that a stylistic analysis of Riffaterre*s discourse allows us to trace the competitive performance of discourses which textual analysis enacts as well as the blurring of aesthetic boundaries which it effects. The analysis, moreover, allows us to see that a dissolution of boundaries between discursive categories is enabled by the poetic technique of indirection and that this indirection is in the service of a paradoxical metamorphosis— through it the poetic is made metaphorically mechanical. In other words, a stylistic analysis allows us to trace the way in which even the most banal of discourses but, more importantly, even the most technical or theoretic of discourses is complicitous with the poetic: to speak technically about a poetic text is to speak poetically; to speak banally about a poetic text is to speak— poetically. What, though, happens to the literary text when the discourse written about it is itself bound up with the question of how to secure an analytic identity and yet collapse the boundaries which distance the technical from the poetic? To move closer to a response, I will turn to 59 the chapter-long interpretation of Balzac*s La Paix du t menage. from which we have, as yet, considered only a brief paragraph, and ask how it is affected by the cliche*s stylistic performance. The chapter can be divided into three parts: in the first, Riffaterre objects to the analytic inadequacies of a generalizing poetics or grammar (153-155). Applying Claude Bremond's model of narrative alternation between structures of amelioration and degradation to the plot of Balzac's story, Riffaterre begins his analysis with a demonstration of the inadequacies of "les etudes actuelles sur le narratif [qui] tendent vers une semiotique autonome" [current studies on the narrative that tend toward an autonomous semiotic] (153). He reminds us that machines whose mechanisms are autonomous to the literary text may be useful in revealing structures common to narratives in general but that they "ne [peuvent] rendre compte de ce que notre roman a en I propre" [cannot account for that which is (unique) | proper to our nove] (157]. The machine of La Paix du I menage must be found within the text: the metaphoric transformation by which the monstrous is rendered i mechanical must be discovered as the text's own overdetermined metamorphosis. 60 In the second part of the chapter, Riffaterre effects a transition into a corrective analysis through the introduction of a particular literary example (Balzac's La Paix du menage) (155-57). And, as we have seen above, it is in these pages that he describes the narrative as la mecanicrue bien huilee. In the third part, Riffaterre will argue that to "reverse steam and move in the direction of the unique," one must transform the disorienting uniqueness of the literary text into a machine by tightening its features into the pattern of a spring— the coils of which are composed of hypogrammatic variants, the center of which is composed of a hypothetical matrix sentence (157-62). It is to this argument that I will address the following pages. It would appear that the third part of the chapter is organized, after the aesthetic of the methode classicrue, as a machine which fuses the rational and moral elements of the literary text it analyzes. Thus, we are told that the movement toward the unique requires that one watch and listen for the sight and sound of the literary text's mainspring— that is to say, for the sight and sound of the repetition of a single textual feature, a hypogrammatic invariant, whose discovered dispersal throughout the narrative winds the complexity and 61 diversity of the story back into the compass of the matrix's coil. And, in the case of La Paix du menage, we are told that one must listen for the repetition of a feature which will account not only for "the schematic quality" of the narrative but for the "didactic clarity" of its expressed moral as well (155). The fusion of the rational and the moral begins with the location of the hypogrammatic machine. Expressed in the form of a candelabra and a woman seated next to it, the machine is identified as the repetition of a metonymy that functions as the model by which all object relations in the story are organized. Its discovery causes a compression or condensation, not only of the story as a whole (all of its complexity and diversity is reduced to a series of variations on the hypogrammatic invariant) but of the metonymy as well? one of the words it joins is displaced. The result is that "la metonymie est transformee en metaphore" [the metonymy is transformed into a metaphor], and the candelabra is metaphorically substituted for the wife (159). The displacement of the metonymy has, however, a second function. It allows the candelabra to assume not only the identity of a metaphor but of a seme as well— it frees the sound-image/concept of the candelabra to move within the rigid lexical constructions, the cliches, of its sociolect. In other 62 words, it frees the candelabra to function semantically. Thus, when the narrator tells us that 1 1 le maitre de requetes s*approchait en papillonnant du candelabre" [the maitre des requetes fluttered toward the candelabra] (1019), we know that (1) by virtue of the metaphoric transformation, he approaches the wife and (2) by virtue of the semantic transformation, his fluttering toward the candelabra "presuppos[e] le groupe le papillon et la (flamme de la] chandelle— image de I1attraction fatale de I1 amour depuis Petrarque" [presupposes the (fabled) group the moth and the flame of the candle— an image of love's fatal attraction since Petrarch] (160). Having discovered the hypogram which controls the metaphoric and semantic transformations of the text's central metonymy, Riffaterre is able to look for "the first or primary actualization, the model...[by which the process is] governed (Semiotics 19). This model belongs specifically to the code in which the text is written and, in the case of La Paix du menage. is located in the story's historical context— the Napoleonic epoch. Returning to the paragraph with which the narrative begins, then, Riffaterre both looks for the text's historical code and listens for the textual feature— the cliche— which (1) actualizes it and (2) unites it with the hypogrammatic machine. Finding both, he will have 63 discovered "the minimal, literal and hypothetical sentence" that constitutes the text's matrix. The discovery is made when hypogram, model and matrix are located in the "intention morale que Balzac a expressement affirmee" [moral intention that Balzac has expressly asserted]: "Un trait de cette epoque, unique dans nos annales, et qui la caracterise, fut une passion effrenee pbur tout ce qui brillait" [one trait of this epoch, which is unique in our annals and which i characterizes it, was a frenzied passion for all that glittered] (La Production 161; Balzac 993). According to Riffaterre, the final phrase of the sentence triggers the click, or cliche, of an associative lexical sequence. Any reader with access to the sociolect in which the story is written will automatically transform "tout ce qui brillait" into tout ce qui brille n 1est pas or. and the model that frames the lexical sequence will, : consequently, be transformed into an illustration of the feature that actualizes it— of that which n 1est pas or. or as we have seen above, of the Napoleonic epoch. The feature that actualizes the model, or the historical code, is then also seen to have overdetermined every element in the text: "Tout ce crui brille." Riffaterre writes, "sert de modele a chaque metonymie de beaute, de passion, ou simplement de desir dans le recit: les 64 femmes, le diamant qui passe de main en main, et surtout le candelabre, comme lampe, comme femme, comme objet de desir" [All that which glitters serves as the model of each metonymy of beauty, of passion, or simply of desire in the story: the women, the diamond which passes from hand to hand, and above all the candelabra, as lamp, as wife, as object of desire] (161). The first thing to note about Riffaterre's interpretation is that it depends upon the semantic click or cliche of a mechanically reproduced lexical sequence— in this case, a proverb; that is to say, the first thing to note is that the interpretation depends upon the reader’s ability to hear the rigid lexical construction of tout ce qui brille n 1est pas or in "tout ce qui brillait." But, just as Riffaterre's description of textual analysis requires that we hear the polemics of I i his debate with Jakobson as well as the poetics of Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations in j_e ne sais cruoi and renverser | la vapeur. just as Riffaterre's explanation of his choice j I of examples requires that we hear the machine of textual j analysis along with Shakespeare's and Rimbaud's Bottoms in la mecanioue bien huilee, the interpretation of La Paix du menage requires that, in addition to the banality of the cliche, we hear a technical as well as a poetic referent in tout ce qui brille n 'est pas or. 65 Thus, asserting first that (1) the text is no more than j the banal repetition of a well-known proverb, the cliche also tells us that (2) because it derives from the minimal, literal, and hypothetical matrix sentence, each component of the text works with the technical precision and rational overdetermination of a well-oiled machine and that (3) the text is defined by its metonymic associations— associations which, as our analysis of la mecanicrue bien huilee has revealed, are modeled on the irrationality and disorienting effect of the metonymic dereqlement which constitutes poetry itself. In addition to this, however, the cliche's centrality to the hypogrammatic-matrical machine alerts us to its material presence in the discourse of the chapter as a whole. As a consequence, the cliche with which Riffaterre explains his attraction to La Paix du menage insists upon drawing our attention. When we consider la mecanicrue bien huilee in the larger context of the entire chapter, we find that it tells us that the interpretation of the story does not begin, in the third part, with the transformation of the text into a machine but that, although it is developed there, the interpretation begins in the second part, with the indirection which the cliche organizes. It tells us that the analysis begins with the cliche's stylistic 66 disruption and poetic indirection and only then continues with the hypogrammatic-matrical displacement of metonymy by metaphor and seme that we have traced above. If we read Riffaterre's analysis without an ear to the stylistic performance staged by la mecanicrue bien huilee. we fail to hear the resonance of the intertexts toward which its poetic indirection points. We fail, as well, to hear the competition of discourses which the cliche^ organizes, and finally, we fail to read the interpretation as the issue of this competition. As a result, we are likely to understand the interpretation as a simple addition of the rational and didactic; we are likely, to situate Riffaterre among those— say Boileau or Corneille— who define the literary text in terms of a classicist aesthetic, one in which reason rules over the irrationality of the passions and renders the text the guardian of rational cognition at passion's expense. But it is precisely the irrational which Riffaterre introduces into the interpretation when he describes La Paix du menage as la mecanicrue bien huilee. For the cliche is responsible for introducing the subtle, indefinable, je ne sais quoi of poetry into the analysis. It tells us that the metonymic monstrosity of its own intertexts is a threat to the monumental closure of the interpretation of the text as hypogrammatic-matrical 67 machine? it tells us, also, that these intertexts will nevertheless be heard. And this is, finally, what must be recognized as the uniqueness of Riffaterre’s drawings, the force of his interpretations: because textual analysis is a metaphoric machine, whose technical discourse is poetically figured and whose metaphors are metonymically disfigured, it can allow the texts it interprets to speak as poetic "debacles de 11 intellect" at the same time that it renders them technically precise and semantically banal machines. Without ever bringing the depavsement. alienation. or bouleversement of a poetic discourse directly into its own— without, in the case of La Paix du menage. ever bringing the metonymic monstrosity of either Shakespeare's or Rimbaud's Bottoms to the surface of the text— Riffaterre is able to structure an interpretation which is, paradoxically, organized by their poetic and metonymic dereqlement. 68 Chapter II "'Tournez les yeux..., apercevez vous.. .? 1 : Balzac and the Illusion of the Candle a Bras" <<N'oubliez pas que 1*Europe a besoin de paix, la France surtout, elle qui ne veut que la paix>> [Don't forget that Europe needs peace, France above all, only wants peace.] — Berthier, the Prince of Neuchatel, to Metternich, Dresden, 1813 «Oui, j'ai fait une bien grande sottise en epousant une archiduchesse d'Autriche. Tout me confirme dans 1*opinion que j'ai commis la une faute impardonnable. En epousant une archiduchesse, j'ai voulu unir le present et le passe, les prejuges gothiques et les institutions de mon siecle; je me suis trompe, et je sens aujourd'hui toute 1'etendue de mon erreur. Cela me coutera peut-etre mon trone, mais j1ensevelirai le monde sous ses ruines» [Yes, I have committed a great folly in marrying an Austrian archduchess. Everything convinces me that I have committed an unpardonable | sin. In marrying an archduchess, I j wanted to unite the present and the i past, Gothic prejudices and the | institutions of my century; I was fooling myself, and today I fully i understand my error. It may cost me my throne, but I will bury the world beneath these ruins.] — Napoleon to | Metternich, Dresden, 1813 j t In the preceding chapter, I have attempted to free my analysis from the burden of a Romantic aesthetic that has too often prompted an uncritical dismissal of the rational and the mechanical in art. More than this, however, I have attempted to free my analysis from the 69 critical presumption of ridding literary theory of the categories of the irrational and the metaphoric. After Baudelaire, I have distinguished the well oiled machine from "the despotic perfectionism of classical ideals" in order to show that, as a contradictory discourse, the mechanical is inextricably tangled with the poetic, that the regularity and precision of the well oiled machine are inseparable from "une debacle de 11 intellect" or "une dereglement de tous les sens" [a debacle of the intellect or a derangement of all the senses].1 Thus far, I have advanced my argument on formalist and intertextual grounds. In the present chapter, however, I would like to reposition myself and to consider the machine from an altogether different perspective— for as poetic as all mechanical devices might be, not all are as self-referential as the one inspired by "Bottom" and A Midsummer Night1s Dream. Some are made of such rude materials as tackle, pullies, cable, and iron chain. Take, for example, the one designed by Launay in 1814 following the order to remove ^ • o Napoleon's statue from the Vendome Column (fig. 1). The rendering of the machine is found in an 1825 pamphlet entitled "Relation des faits qui se sont passes lors de la descente de la statue de Napoleon erigee sur la colonne de la place Vendome..." [Relation 70 of the events that occured during the removal of the statue of Napoleon erected on the Column in the Place Vendome]. Authored by the man who designed both the rQioii f1 ■ r S f r j g f r Y o ) ? Y o b Fig. 1. J.B. Launay, untitled etching. "Relation des faits qui se sont passes lors de la descente de la statue de Napoleon erigee sur la colonne de la place Vendome...". Paris: J. Tastu, 1825. Bound in an unedited collection of pamphlets entitled Napoleon I: Secondary Material. Harvard University, n.d. 71 statue which crowned the Column and the machine by which it was removed, the publication describes the actual circumstances under which an artist can be forced to alter the design and construction of what was, in his own words, "un des plus beaux ouvrages du statuaire qui avait ete long-temps le chef de [son] ecole" [one of the most i beautiful works of statuary which, for some time, had been considered the masterpiece of its school] (Launay 7). It offers a detailed account of the materials and techniques employed to realize the machine's design; but j i most importantly, it provides a detailed account of the complicity of the act of the monument's construction (the Column is inaugurated on 15 August, 1810 during the wedding celebrations following the marriage of Napoleon and Marie-Louise) and the act of its destruction (the statue that crowned the Column is removed on 8 April, 1814, immediately following the Emperor's abdication). That is to say, it provides the logic by which the events of 1814 and Napoleon's fall from power are collapsed into the events of 18Q9-10 and the "moment ou le fugitif empire de Napoleon atteignit a 1'apogee de sa splendeur" [the moment when Napoleon's ephemeral empire had attained i the height of its splendor] (Balzac 992). From the pamphlet, we learn that Launay is persuaded to involve himself in the destruction of the masterpeice only 72 because, ironically, as its caster, he "savai[t] comment la statue etait posee et scellee sur la Colonne" [knew how the statue was placed and secured upon the Column] (Launay 11). Launay writes, 1 1 [on 1 April, 1814], vandales. . . , hommes qui avaient le desir de la destruction, sans en avoir le genie", had attempted to pull the Emperor's statue from the Column; "las de l'inutilite de leurs efforts, ils proposaient deja de faire jouer la mine, lorsque le fondeur qui avait coule la statue (et c'est moi Launay) vint offrir ses services" [barbarians, men who had the desire for destruction, without having the genius for it, had attempted to pull the statue from the Column; tired by the ineffectuality of their efforts, they were already proposing to set off a mine, when the designer who had cast the statue (and it is I Launay) came to offer his services]. He adds: "Pour effacer un pareil trait de vandalisme, il serait temps de reparer la mutilation faite a la Colonne, en remplacant la statue de Napoleon par une figure allegorique..." [to erase the seeming trace of barbarism, it would be necessary to repair the mutilation done to the Column by replacing Napoleon's statue with an allegorical figure..." (7). Corroborating and supplementary documentation alters Launay's account only slightly. Documents preserved in 73 the Archives Nationales and quoted by Marie-Louise Biver in Le Paris de Napoleon, tell us that the designer and caster of the statue did indeed offer his services but only on 4 April, 1814, after "le gouvernement se decide enfin a agir: «Launay, le fondeur, est mis en demeure de descendre la statue et menace, s'il s'y refuse, <<d*execution militaire>> [the government finally decided to act: "Launay, the caster, is ordered to remove the statue and threatened, if he refuses, "with a military action"] (Biver 173). Plans for replacing the statue with an allegorical figure were begun, but "en attendant une problematique statue de la Paix, un drapeau blanc est hisse sur le monument [while waiting for a complicated statue of Peace, a white flag was raised over the monument] (Biver 173; Janssens 15 Jan. 1961). The allegorical figure of Peace is never, actually, mounted upon the Column: from 1814 to 1833, "un drapeau tantot blanc, tantot tricolore, selon les differents gouverne- ments qui se succedent" waved over the monument [a flag, first white, then tricolor, according to the different governments that came into power]. As Biver writes, "l'effet [etait] minable" [the effect was pitifully mediocre] (174). One might well wonder why I have chosen to introduce Launay's machine, and the textual account that 74 accompanies it, into my argument; one might well ask what a study that began with matters of style and discourse has to do with the construction of historical monuments and the exigencies that lead to their destruction. Let me respond that neither the "nuts and bolts" example of an actual machine nor its juxtaposition to the stylistic machine of textual analysis is arbitrary: what motivates both the example and the juxtaposition is the convergence of Launay*s and Riffaterre*s machines upon a single text— Balzac*s La Paix du menage. For Balzac's text is not only produced by Shakespeare's romantic comedy and Rimbaud's prose poem (the poetic referents of the hypogrammatic-matrical operations that I discussed in chapter one). The text is not only produced by variations on a candelabra or by the hypothetical association of "tout ce qui brillait" with n*est pas or. It is also produced by what Louis Montrose, in another context, calls the "historicity of texts and the textualitv of history" (305). It is produced (1) in July of 1829, exactly one year before the 1830 Revolution, at a time when the peace of the menage was once again violently threatened; (2) by documented accounts of a scene that breaks out on the evening of 3 0 November, 1809 ("scene qui revela le prochain divorce de [Napoleon et Josephine])" [a scene which revealed the coming divorce 75 of Napoleon and Josephine] (Balzac 994)? and (3) by what the text repeatedly introduces as 1 1 la colonne brisee qui supporte un candelabre" [the broken column which supports a candelabra] (Balzac 994).3 For it is left to Balzac to erase the traces of barbarism and to secure the ancient "figure allegorique de la Paix" upon the broken menage. * It is left to Balzac to succeed where Napoleon had failed and to unite the present with the past. What I mean to say here is that, in analyzing the i text, we cannot ignore the convergence of (1) historicity | and textuality or (2) historicism and aesthetic distance. We cannot pretend to ignorance of the fact that the events narrated in the text occur twenty years before La Paix du menage is written, at a time when Napoleon breaks his matrimonial vows with the Empress Josephine and prepares for his "alliance" with an Austrian archduchess. Neither can we avoid the fact that the narrative anachro- nistically anticipates a period in French history during j which the white flag of the French royalty replaces Napoleon*s statue on the Vendome Column and during which the white flag of peace and bourgeois prosperity become as highly prized as diamonds and the arbitrary, absolute power of a despot had been during the Empire. We cannot ignore the fact that the text repeatedly draws our attention to a broken column that supports a candelabra 76 and not simply to a candelabra, as Riffaterre suggests. We cannot ignore the fact that the text caries on an intertextual discourse with Dante's Divine Comedy or that Balzac writes to refigure history as an aesthetic ideal. We cannot for the simple reason that the words on the page don't allow it.4 Even such terse remarks as these demonstrate that an acknowledgment of the inextricable tangle that defines the relation of the textual and the historical casts La Paix du menage in a very different light from that in which we viewed it in chapter one. They suggest, as I will develop at length in the following pages, that no matter how much the hypogrammatic-matrical machine tells us about the function of tropic substitution in Balzac's text, its insistence upon the exclusivity and self- referentiality of the literary monument leads to obfuscations, elisions, and distortions that render the literary text virtually unrecognizable.5 In the case of La Paix du menage, entire passages are treated not only as if they had no effect on the form of the hypogram or matrix but as if they simply didn't exist. Let me give three examples: — L'aventure retracee par cette Scene se passa vers la fin du mois de novembre 1809, moment ou le fugitif empire de Napoleon atteignit a 1'apogee de sa splendeur. Les fanfares de la victoire de Wagram retentissaient encore au coeur de la monarchie autrichienne. La paix se signait entre la France et la Coalition. ... Jamais, au dire des contemporains, Paris ne vit de plus belles fetes que celles qui precederent et suivirent le mariage de ce souverain avec une archiduchesse d'Autriche. (992) — Les ambassadeurs de toutes les puissances amies de la France sous benefice d*inventaire, les personnages les plus importants de 1*Empire, quelques princes meme, etaient en ce moment reunis dans les salons du...comte de Gondreville,.... La danse languissait, chacun attendait l'empereur, dont la presence etait promise par le comte. Napoleon aurait tenu parole sans la scene qui eclata le soir meme entre Josephine et lui, scene qui revela le prochain divorce de ces augustes epoux. (994) — Le general Montcornet n'epousa point madame de Vaudremont, malgre la bonne intelligence dans laquelle tous deux vecurent pendant quelques instants, car elle fut une des victimes de 1 * epouvantable incendie qui rendit a jamais celebre le bal donne par 1'ambassadeur d'Autriche, a 1'occasion du mariage de 11empereur Napoleon avec la fille de l'empereur Frangois II. (102 6) [— The events related in this Scene took place about the end of November, 1809, a time when Napoleon's ephemeral Empire had reached the height of its splendor. The fanfares over the victory at Wagram were still sounding in the heart of the Austrian monarchy. The Peace Treaty between France and the Coalition was being signed. ... Never, according to contemporary opinion, had Paris seen more splendid festivities than those which preceded and followed the marriage of this ruler to an Austrian archduchess. 78 — The ambassadors of all the powers ^ friendly to France pending the drawing up of treaties, the most important people in the Empire, even some princes, were at that moment gathered together in the salons of the Comte de Gondreville... . The dancers were flagging, everyone was waiting for the Emperor whose presence had been promised by the Count. Napoleon would have kept his word but for the scene that broke out that very evening between Josephine and himself, a scene that revealed the coming divorce of this august husband and wife. — General Montcornet did not marry Madame i de Vaudremont, in spite of the good understanding that reigned between them for a short while. She was one of the victims of the terrible fire that made famous for ever the ball given by the Austrian ambassador on the occasion of the marriage of the Emperor Napoleon to the daughter of the Emperor Francis II.] In each of the passages, we find specific allusions to temporal events that situate La Paix du menage in a carefully contextualized and well documented period of Napoleonic history. Taken together, the passages define "the cultural specificity, the social embedment" (Montrose 3 05) in which all of the textual features circulate: (1) the Emperor Napoleon's final defeat of the Austrian armies at Wagram; (2) his plans to marry the daughter of the defeated Austrian Emperor, Franz II; (3) the scene that breaks out between Napoleon and Josephine on the night of 30 November, 1809, when the Emperor announces to the Empress his decision to divorce; and (4) 79 the tragic and prophetic conflagration that breaks out on 1 July, 1810 during the wedding celebrations of Napoleon and Marie-Louise at the Austrian Embassy. Without these passages, the text's "colonne brisee qui support un candelabre" [the broken column that supports a candelabra] cannot be recognized as a metaphor of the Column crowned with a statue of Napoleon, the Column that was constructed to celebrate the Emperor's first victory over the Austrians at Austerlitz and inaugurated during the marriage celebrations of Napoleon and the daughter of the defeated Austrian Emperor; the confusion of marital passions as well as objects of desire cannot be read as the undermining of Napoleon's martial force, the presaging of his abdication, or the brise imoitovable [pitiless breaking] of the Column (Launay 7). Beyond this, the textual identification of the Emperor with la dame bleue [the lady in blue]— an identification at which we have yet to look— cannot be read as either a hermaphroditic refiguring of the Emperor or as an allegorical recasting of the Column in the transcendent and ideal form of a Balzacien aesthetic; finally, the figuration of la dame bleue as an elegy ("Ne j trouves-tu pas qu'elle a un peu l'air d'une elegie?" i [Don't you think that she is a little like an elegy?] 996)) cannot be read as the failure of the balzacien aesthetic to transform the historicity as well as the ] i historicism of la comedie humaine into the aesthetic of la divine comedie. Let me interrupt myself at this point to address the I confusion that these comments have, no doubt, created. All of us who remember the description of the text on which Riffaterre bases his analysis are likely to have lost our bearings in the context of the claims that I am now making. The confusion would not be unmerited. For, although both Riffaterre and I claim to be writing about Balzac's La Paix du menage, the text that he analyzes is, i admittedly, not the text that I analyze. Here is the text that Riffaterre claims to have read: c'est un roman de moeurs, selon Balzac, une etude de la societe frangaise a 1'apogee de 1'Empire, d'une epoque de moeurs dissolues, de fievreuse poursuite du plaisir. Les femmes d'alors, nous dit-il, se jetaient a la tete des jeunes heros de l'armee imperiale. L'intrigue | et le denouement, congus sur le principe du boomerang, ont le ton de la comedie j legere: un roue entreprend de seduire la ; femme de l'homme dont il a deja vole la maitresse; mais la cour qu'il lui fait permet a l'epouse de ramener a elle son mari en eveillant sa jalousie, et la maitresse abandonne le roue pour un tiers. La femme legitime fait semblant d 'encourager notre debauche en acceptant le diamant qu'il lui offre pour la seduire, diamant qui, en fait, etait a elle et que son mari lui avait dit avoir perdu, alors qu'il 1'avait donne a sa maitresse, qui a son tour en avait fait cadeau a son autre amant, notre roue. Ayant recouvre le diamant, l'epouse force son mari a confesser ses torts: il revient a elle. En dehors de ce happy ending, qui se derole comme il convient dans 1*alcove, toutes les peripeties se succedent pendant le bal donne par un riche senateur pour celebrer une victoire de Napoleon. (155-6) [According to Balzac, it is a novel of morals, a study of French society at the height of the Empire, a time of moral dissipation and the feverish pursuit of pleasure. At that time, he tells us, women would throw themselves at the young heroes of the Imperial Army. The plot and its resolution, conceived according to the boomerang principle, have the tone of light comedy. A rake sets out to seduce a rich man's wife after he has already stolen his mistress, but his wooing only enables the wife to win back her husband by arousing his jealousy, and the mistress leaves the rake for a third party. The lawful wife pretends to encourage our debauchee by accepting a diamond which he offers in hopes of seducing her, a diamond which, in fact, belongs to her and that her husband has told her was lost after having given it to his mistress, who in turn had made a gift of it to her lover, our rogue. Having recovered the diamond, the wife forces her husband to confess his injustices; he returns to her. Except for this happy ending, which appropriately takes place in the bedroom, all of the revelations follow one from the other during a ball given by a rich senator to celebrate one of Napoleon's victories.] (155-6) So committed is Riffaterre to demonstrating that "tout se passe a[u] niveau...de signifiants" [that everything happens at the level of the signifier] (La 82 Production 19) that, again and again, he erases those textual features that would compromise the self- referential exclusivity and aesthetic distance of the literary monument. But a comparison of Riffaterre!s summary with the three elided passages cited above demonstrates that in eliding the relationships by which story, narrative, and narration are mutually defined, the analytic theory that claims to guard the aesthetic monument, in fact, destroys the text. By cutting through the tangled knot of textuality and historicity, Riffaterre*s analysis effects a bewildering misprision. Where an elegy for the divine comedy stood, a "comedie legere" now stands. To return to Balzac*s la Paix du menage. let me, then, offer a second summary— one that will acknowledge La Paix du menage as a contradictory discourse, a machine, like Launay*s, that breaks the metaphoric Column of the Emperor Napoleon, in order to preserve "un des plus beaux ouvrages de statuaire qui avait ete long- temps le chef de [son] ecole," and that refigures the Emperor as an allegory, in order to postulate a divine transcendence of the ephemeral splendor of la comedie humaine. Written in 1829, in the context of increased political unrest and the anticipation of the end of 83 Charles X's monarchy, the narrative looks back to the events of 1809-1810— to a context in which the end of Napoleon*s Empire is anticipated. Thus, the text moves between two periods in French history (18 02-1814 and 1824-183 0) during which the arbitrary, despotic rule of an absolute monarchy is created and, then, destroyed. The narrative is broken into three parts: (1) the events of the opening of a narrative frame; (2) the events of the narrative proper; and (3) the events of the closing i 7 | of the narrative's frame. In the first, we find the i introduction of the historicizing machine by which the Napoleonic Empire was created and, subsequently, refigured; in the second, the introduction of a poetic j machine, one that is produced by the laws or conventions * of a medieval morality play and in which a broken i j Napoleon, and the history that he organizes, is associated with la dame bleue. the Holy Virgin, and the redemptive history that she organizes; in the third, we find the failure of the historicizing as well as the poetic machine to finally conquer the actualities of temporal events, to redeem Napoleon, and establish the Emperor as "le plus beau pouvoir connu, le pouvoir le plus concentre, le plus mordant, le plus acide [et absolu] de tous les pouvoirs [the greatest power ever known, the most concentrated power, the most incisive, 84 the most astringent and absolute of all powers] (Balzac "Autre etude de Femme" III; Maurois, Promethee II 148). Or less epigrammatically... Beginning with the historicized events that took place in Paris during the final days of November 1809, the text proceeds to present events marking the celebrations for the Emperor's victory over the Austrians at Wagram? the absence of Napoleon from a ball held in honor of the Peace Treaty? and the Emperor Napoleon's simultaneous preparations for divorce and remarriage. This information is followed by the equally abrupt disappearance of Napoleon from the narrative and appearance of an anachronistically pure and innocent young woman, "la dame bleue" [the lady in blue]. In the context of the ball, she fights to win her husband, the Count de Soulanges, from his mistress, the Countess de Vaudremont. This fight is successfully concluded when the wife retrieves a diamond that Soulanges has taken from her and given to his mistress. It is organized as an overlapping series of menage a • trois in which la dame bleue must circulate to secure a victory— and an escape. The narration, thus, functions by means of tropic substitutions and a metonymic confusion of antinomies. Both the Emperor and la dame bleue are associated with "une colonne brisee qui support un candelabre" and 85 the Virgin's battle to redeem a profligate husband is conflated with the Emperor's battle to secure absolute and perpetual power through a union with Austria. Just as it would seem that both battles are won, the narrative proper ends. We are abruptly returned to the narrative frame, to the brilliant celebrations of 1809- 1810, and to "1'epouvantable incendie qui rendit a jamais celebre le bal donne par 1'ambassadeur d'Autriche, a 1*occasion du mariage de L'empereur Napoleon avec la fille de l'empereur Frangois II" [the terrifying fire that made famous for ever the ball given by the Austrian ambassador on the occasion of the marriage of the Emperor Napoleon with the daughter of the Emperor Francis II] (1026). Having postulated a hypothetical union between Napoleon and the Holy Virgin, the narrative nevertheless concludes with the prophetic conflagration of its own historicity. Both the "immense candelabre...[dont Isabey] a donne le dessin [the immense candelabra designed by Isabey] (Balzac 992) as well as La Paix du menage designed by Balzac are left in ruins.8 Unlike Riffaterre's summary of La Paix du menage, the one I have written acknowledges the discursive relation between both the textuality of history, and the historicity of the text, as well as the historicism of an aesthetic and the aestheticization of history. Thus, an 86 analysis which follows from this second summary can begin i with the text*s own historicized tropes— with its lexical j i evocations of the culturally specific associations linking the Napoleonic Empire to "une passion effrenee pour tout ce qui brillait" [an unbridled passion for all that which shined/glittered/sparkled] (993)— and move toward an articulation of the way in which Balzac has attempted to effect a compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics of language in his text. THE OPENING AND THE CLOSING OF A NARRATIVE FRAME If we return to the first pages of La Paix du menage. we find that they are organized as a catalogue of i tout ce oui brille— by stars, fireworks, and diamonds; we also find that the catalogue is organized by the symbolic, ideological descriptions of Napoleon that were i | I circulated through French culture in 18 09 and that remained in circulation in 1829. We find that Balzac1s description of the Emperor in terms of stars, fireworks, and diamonds required litle invention from the author: Napoleon*s image as the brightest of all stars, illuminations and diamonds had, long before the publication of La Paix du menage. circulated within the j popular imagination of the French people. That is to say, we find that while textual signifiers, in the form 87 of stars, fireworks, and diamonds, command the opening of the narrative frame, they command as Napoleon*s designated, and historicized, subjects. If we do no more than read the words on the page, we , learn that Napoleon is evoked as the star around which a universe turns: we are told that the kings and princes j of Europe revolve about the Emperor like "astres" [astral bodies, stars] (992); in order to win Napoleon's favor, each attempts to eclipse ["eclipser"] his rivals (994). It is Napoleon, moreover, who occasions the display of both fireworks and diamonds: we are told that "never were there so many fireworks, never had the diamond attained such a high value[,]...never...had Paris seen more beautiful balls than those which preceded and followed the marriage of [the] sovereign to an Austrian archduchess" ["Jamais on ne donna tant de feux d*artifice, jamais le diamant n'atteignit a une si grande valeur[,]...jamais,... Paris ne vit de plus belles fetes que celles qui precederent et suivirent le mariage de ce souverain avec une archiduchesse d'Autriche"] (993-992). Turning to the cultural specificity in which the text is embedded, however, we are reminded that the description of Napoleon as a solar body inevitably calls to mind the "Stellae Napoleonis," which was introduced 88 into the Constellation Orion by the University of Leipzig in 1807 (fig. 2). Fig. 2. "Les Etoiles de Napoleon, <<Stellae Napoleonis,» introduites dans la constellation d*Orion par L'Universite de Leipzig en 1807". (Fac-simile d'une gravure allemande). Reproduced in Napoleon. G. Lacour- Gayet. Paris: Librarie Hachette, 1921. 89 In addition, we are reminded that the description evokes the title with which the Emperor was crowned following the defeat of the Austrian and Russian armies in 1805, "le soleil d*Austerlitz" [the sun of Austerlitz], as well as the "Table d'Austerlitz ou des Marechaux," a table designed, again, by Isabey, that depicts the Emperor as the star about whom the Marshalls came to "accomplir leurs evolutions" [make their revolutions] (see fig. 3) and the Column of Austerlitz, the monument that crowned "l'epoque la plus brillante, la plus triomphante du regne [de Napoleon]" [the most brillaint epoch, the most triumphant of Napoleon's reign] (Biver 171-172; Marmottan 163; see figs. 4-6). i 90 | Fig. 3. La "Table d'Austerlitz ou des Marechaux." I Reproduced in Chateaux de Malmaison et de Bois Preau. Gerard and Nicole Hubert. Paris: Editions de la Reunion des musees nationaux, 198 6. 92 Statue de I ’empereur Napoleon p o u r la Colonne de la place Ven dome, p a r Chaudet. La Colonne de la place Vendome, • r ff la statue de N apolion. Fig. 5. Fig. 6. 93 Fig. 4 (page 91). "Elevation de la Colonne de la place Vendome." Publie dans Napoleon a la Grande Armee, 1810. Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris. Reprinted in Le Paris de Napoleon. i Fig. 5 (page 9 2 ). "La Colonne de la place Vendome, avec la statue de Napoleon." Publie dans Napoleon a la Grande Armee. 1810. Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris. Reprinted in Le Paris de Napoleon. Fig. 6 (page 92). "Statue de 11empereur Napoleon pour la Colonne de la place Vendome, par Chaudet. Publie dans Napoleon a la grande Armee. 1810. Bibliotheque historique de la Ville de Paris. Reprinted in Le Paris de Napoleon. i j Beyond this, the text's reference to the value of diamonds triggers cultural associations with the i fantastic display of jewels made by the Emperor and I Empress of France on the occasion of their Coronation. j As Knapton writes: "the more than two thousand diamonds ; I I and brilliants that the jewelers assembled for ; Josephine's adornment were valued at close to 900,000 francs"; "...the famous "Regent" (once the Pitt Diamond), that Napoleon wore in the pommel of his sword, has to be described as priceless" (Knapton 223; see figure 7). A detail from David's celebrated Coronation painting sharpens the point (fig. 8): 94 0 ^ Fig. 7. The Empress Josephine's coronation diadem of silver and gold set with 1,040 diamonds, 1804 (Van Cleef and Arpels, New York). Reproduced in The Age of Napoleon. Ed. Katell le Bourhis. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Harry N. Abrams, Inc..Is 1 i i 95 Fig. 8. Detail from "The Coronation Painting," Jacques Louis David. 1805-1808. Reproduced in Empress Josephine. Ernest John Knapton. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1963. 96 The reference to the elaborate firework displays of the period resonates with the brilliance of the illuminations Fig. 9. "Feu d'artifice", tire en face de la place de Greve, le 16 decembre 1804. Ce jour-la une fete, d'une somptuosite extaordinaire, fut offerte a l'Empereur par la Ville de Paris, a 1*Hotel de Ville. Le feu d'artifice representait le Passage du Grand Saint-Bernard, avec 11 image equestre du Premier Consul, Sur la Seine, un navire illumine symbolisait Paris." Bibliotheque Nationale, Estampes. Reproduced in Napoleon. G. Lacour- Gayet. Paris: Hachette, 1921. 97 that celebrated the consecration and crowning of Josephine and Napoleon at Notre Dame on 2 December, 18 04 (see fig. 9). But most significantly, the splendor of the firework displays evokes "1'etoile feerique" [the magical star] which Napoleon ordered to illuminate the skies on the birth of le roi de Rome [21 March, 1811]— a display in which the dramatic interweaving of stars and fireworks with the person of the Emperor is graphically demonstrated, a display described by Montorgueil and illustrated by Job: "Etoile merveilleuse, dans le firmament, elle apparaissait a tous comme celle meme de l'Empereur; elle etait 1'etoile qui s'etait levee avec sa fortune, et qui atteignait, a cet heure, au zenith" [marvelous star in the heavens, appearing to all as if it were the Emperor's own star; it was the star that had risen with his fortune, and that had attained, at that hour, its zenith] (42-43; fig. 10). "Tout ce qui brillait" only excites the associations j i that I have traced above, however, when it circulates inside the cultural boundaries of a carefully orchestrated Napoleonic historicism and is considered in the celebratory context of les plus belles fetes aue Paris avait vu [the most beautiful festivities that Paris had seen] (992)— the context of the opening of the narrative frame. The text presents a second context, Fig. 10. Job. "Untitled illustration". Job and Georges Montorgueil. Napoleon. Paris: Ancienne Librairie Furne, 1921. 99 however— that of the closing of the narrrative frame. When "tout ce qui brillait" is read in reference to the ball with which the text concludes, another contradictory set of associations is triggered— one that frustrates the efforts of a Napoleonic historicism. In the text's final paragraph, "tout ce qui brillait" is associated with "1'epouvantable incendie qui rendit a jamais celebre le bal donne par 1'ambassadeur d'Autriche, a 1*occasion du mariage de 1'empereur Napoleon avec la fille de l'empereur Frangois II (1026). Balzac's reference to the horrific tragedy that would forever link the splendor of the Empire to an incendiary elemental force of destruction is all the more powerful for its understatement. In the aftermath of the fire, contemporary readers would have automatically associated celebratory firework displays and the glittering of diamonds with conflagrational demise. Descriptions of the tragic night written by those who attended the ball are organized, no less than was the i opening of La Paix du menage, with references to stars, fireworks, and diamonds. From the Count de Bausset's Memoires, for example, we learn: La fete commenga par des danses executees dans le jardin au milieu d'une superbe illumination... . On se rendit ensuite dans la salle de bal, ou l'on dansait depuis une heure environ, lorsq'un courant d'air, agitant un des rideaux ...les poussa contre les bougies, qui malheureusement etaient trop rapprochees; ces rideaux s1enflammerent. ... En moins de trois minutes, l'incendie, comme une trainee d*artifice, gagna les plafonds de la salle, et toutes les legeres decorations dont elle etait ornee. ... En peu de minutes les flammes avaient devore ce lieu, qui naguere, semblable a un palais enchante, renfermait tout ce que la France avait de graces et de beaute... Lorsque tout a coup au milieu des debris enflammes, et lorsque tout etait silencieux comme la mort, on vit s1elancer une femme jeune, belle, d'une taille elegante, couverte de diamants, agitee, poussant des cris douloureux, des cris de mere... Elle n'etait deja plus cette belle princesse de Schwartzenberg... (Bausset II, 28-30) [The fete began with dances performed in the garden in the midst of a magnificent illumination. The company then repaired to the ballroom, where they danced for about an hour before a current of air blew the curtains against the candles which unfortunately were too near; the curtains went up in flames. In less than three minutes the fire, like a train of fireworks, reached the ceiling of the ballroom, and all the ornaments with which it was decorated. In a few minutes the flames had entirely destroyed a place which a short time before resembled an enchanted palace, and contained all the grace and beauty of France,— when all of a sudden, in the midst of the burning wreck, when all was silent as death, a beautiful young woman, of an elegant figure, covered with diamonds, rushed forward deeply agitated, uttering the most sorrowful and heart rending cries— the cries of a despairing mother... . In a moment afterwards the beautiful Princess Schwartzenberg was no more...] 101 The introduction of the contradictory circulation of diamonds and firework displays in celebratory as well as conflagrational and apocalyptic contexts is all the more forcefully expressed in the letter that the Empress I Marie-Louise writes to her father the morning following the ball: j J'arrive de chez l'empereur, ou j'ai appris une affreuse nouvelle. La princesse Pauline Schwarzenberg a ete retrouvee toute calcinee...Les diamants de sa riviere etaient egrenes aupres d'elle. Elle portait au cou un coeur en brillants, sur lequel etaient ecrits les noms de ses deux filles: Eleonore et Pauline. Ce fut a ce bijou qu'on la reconnut. (Saint-Amand 290) [I have just come from the Emperor, from whom I learned of horrifying news. The Princess Pauline Schwarzenberg has been found completely calcified...The diamonds of her necklace had fallen beside her. She wore a heart of brilliants around her neck on which were engraved the names of j her two daughters: a Eleanor and Pauline. j It was from this piece of jewelry that she was recognized.] j In the horrific juxtapostion of the calcified body i » surrounded by diamonds— and more subtly, in the J i juxtaposition of the frame's textual references— the ! problem of the chiasmic break between textuality, historicity, historicism, and aesthetic distance is staged. No matter how masterful Napoleon's command over texts might have been, he was powerless in the face of the conflagration that turned his marriage celebrations 102 into a prophetic tragedy. How to employ the text as a tool by which to command the specifics of time and place, how to create, or recreate, Napoleon as an absolute, victorious force— one whose power to secure La oaix du menage could never be challenged: these are the questions that Balzac attempts to answer in the narrative proper with the introduction of the narrative*s organizing trope, "une colonne brisee qui supporte un candelabre." THE NARRATIVE PROPER The narrative*s organizing trope is introduced in the first line of textual dialogue when one anonymous character, speaking to another, effects the following substitution: "Tournez un peu les yeux vers cette colonne brisee qui supporte un candelabre, apercevez-vous une jeune femme...?" [Turn your eyes a little toward that broken column that supports a candelabra, do you see a young woman...?] (994) Like the abrupt shift in tone, speaker, and setting, the question is disorienting. In the jettisoned frame, we had learned that the presence that would turn all heads, the presence that everyone anticipates, and the presence automatically associated with tout ce qui brille is not the young woman's but the Emperor Napoleon's. 103 So thoroughly has tout ce qui brille been associated with desire, so thoroughly have both glitter and desire been associated with Napoleon that, even in the context of a direct invocation of their association with the young woman, they continue to circulate inside the context of historicized stars, fireworks, and diamonds. When, for example, General Montcornet (the character to whom the first directive/question is addressed) attempts to turn his host's eyes toward the young woman, he meets with an unanticipated resistance: "— Gondreville, mon cher ami, lui dit Montcornet, quelle est done cette charmante petite femme assise la-bas sous cet immense candelabre?" " — Le candelabre? Ravrio, mon cher, Isabey en a donne le dessin." "— Ohi j'ai deja reconnu ton gout et ton faste dans le meuble? mais la femme? "— Ah! je ne la connais pas." (998) ["— Gondreville, my dear friend, Montcornet said to him, who is that charming little woman seated over there under that immense candelabra?" "— The candelabra? Ravrio, my dear, Isabey designed it." "— Oh! I already know your taste and luck with furniture; but the woman?" "■— Ah! I don't know her."] It is not enough to attribute Gondreville's confusion, as Riffaterre does, to the text's exhaustive identification of the candelabra and the young woman: "le candelabre finit par symboliser [l'epouse]— incident significatif a cet egard: a la premiere question qu'on pose 104 sur elle, le maitre de maison comprend de travers et croit qu'on lui demande le prix du candelabre." (Lja Production 159; Balzac 998) [the candelabra ends by symbolizing the wife— a significant incident in this regard: the master of the house reverses the first question that he is asked about her and thinks that he has been asked the price of the candelabra.] The confusion that the column/candelabra engenders must also be attributed to the cultural specificity of the text. When Gondreville turns his attention toward the source of illumination, what he sees is a symbol saturated with historicized, Napoleonic significance. Embarrassed by his guest of honor's absence, he finds consolation in drawing attention to his possession of an object that can function as the Emperor's second— a candelabra designed by Isabey, the artist Napoleon had ' 1 called upon m 18 04 to design the scenes of the i j Coronation (Knapton 221); the artist Napoleon had called ! upon in 1806 to paint the portraits revolving about the i Emperor on the Table d 'Austerlitz. 1 l To turn attention to the woman in the face of such j I resistance, Montcornet must disrupt the relation of i desire, perception, and trope organized in the narrative frame. And this is what he does when, in response to ; i Gondreville, he refers to Isabey's design as "un meuble"— a piece of furniture, a piece of personal 105 property. Montcornet sets "la femme" against the signifier of personal property. The oppositional function of the conjunction "mais" enables the juxtaposition and transforms le meuble [personal property] into 11immeuble [real property] in relation to her. Already identified as la dame bleue (996), described as "un rose blanche,...voilee par les nuages de la tristesse" [a white rose, veiled by clouds of sadness] (997), and associated with "un vrai miracle" [a true miracle] (996), she is now associated with, what Fredric Jameson in another context calls, "the mild and warming fantasy of landed property..., the tangible figure of a Utopian wish-fulfillment" (157). And because she is seen i by looking at "la colonne brisee qui supporte un candelabre," what one sees when looking at her is ; Napoleon— not a Napoleon associated with the horrifying historiciy of calcified bodies, nor with the instability of textual signification, but with a Napoleon refigured in the positive light of redemptive, aestheticized J i historicism. i To effect Napoleon's union with the immeuble, Balzac must not only dissociate the Emperor from the ephemeral glitter of the candelabra, however; he must also dissociate the Emperor from the historical specificity in which Imperial force has been dissipated— particularly 106 from the women who have made of the Emperor "une bien grande sottise": Josephine and Marie-Louise. To that end, Balzac turns to an account of the scene which marks the end of Napoleon's marriage to the Empress i Josephine. Once again underscoring the cultural \ specificity of the text, Balzac tells us only that "l'histoire recueillait...la nouvelle de...la scene qui i revela le prochain divorce de ces augustes epoux.. . , scene alors tenue fort secrete" [history recorded the news of the scene that revealed the coming divorce of the august couple, a scene that was then kept a close secret] j (994). Documents of the period tell us that the scene to which Balzac refers was, of course, made public as well as textual, in 1827, two years before the publication of La Paix du menage, by Napoleon's palace prefect, the Count de Bausset. His is a curious and farcical account ; of events which would otherwise seem tragic— one that | prepares for the transformation of a wife into a piece of j movable furniture, the hermaphroditic transformation of j i Napoleon into la dame bleue, as well as a the i transformation of a human into a divine comedy— and from I l which I will, therefore, quote at length.10 Bausset j i writes: J'etais debout pres de la porte, lorsque Napoleon l'ouvrit lui-meme, et m'apercevant, me dit vivement: "Entrez, Bausset, et fermez la porte." J'entre dans le salon, et j'apergois 11imperatrice etendue sur le tapis, poussant des cris et des plaintes dechirantes. «Non, je n'y survivrai point,» disait 11infortunee. Napoleon me dit: «Etes- vous assez fort pour enlever Josephine et la porter chez elle par I1escalier interieur qui communique a son appartement...? J'obeis et je soulevai cette princesse, que je croyais atteinte d'une attaque de nerfs. Avec I1aide de Napoleon, je l'enlevai dans mes bras, et lui-meme prenant un flambeau sur la table, m'eclaira et ouvrit la porte du salon, qui par un couloir obscur conduisait au petit escalier dont il m'avait parle. ... Mais je vis le moment ou, embarrasse par mon epee, nous allions tous tomber; heureusement nous descendimes sans accident... . Lorsque dans le salon d'en haut j'enlevai 11imperatrice, elle cessa de se plaindre; je crus qu'elle se trouvait mal, mais dans le moment ou je m 1embarrassai dans mon epee au milieu du petit escalier dont j'ai deja parle, je fus oblige de la serrer davantage, pour eviter une chute qui aurait ete funeste aux acteurs de cette douloureuse scene, parce que nos positions n*etaient pas la suite d'un arrangement calcule a loisir. Je tenais 11imperatrice dans mes bras, qui entouraient sa taille, son dos etait appuye sur ma poitrine, et sa tete etait penchee sur mon epaule droite. Lorsqu'elle sentit les efforts que je faisais pour m'empecher de tomber, elle me dit tout bas: «Vous me serrez trop fort.>> Je vis alors que je n'avais rien a craindre pour sa sante, et qu'elle n'avait pas perdu connaissance un seul instant. (I, 370-372) [I was standing close to the door, when the Emperor himself opened it, and perceiving me, said quickly, "Come in Bausset, and shut the door." I entered the chamber and saw the Empress Josephine stretched on the carpet, uttering piercing cries and sobs. "No, I will never survive it," said the unfortunate woman. Napoleon asked me: "Have you sufficient strength to lift Josephine, and to carry her to her rooms by the private staircase...?" I obeyed and raised this princess, who, I thought, was seized with a nervous affliction. With the aid of Napoleon, I raised her into my arms, and he himself taking a candlestick from the table, opened the door, which, by a narrow passage, led to the little staircase of which he had spoken. I foresaw, however, a moment when, embarrassed by my sword, we might very well fall, but fortunately we descended without incident... . When, in the salon, I had lifted the Empress, she ceased to moan, and I thought that she had fainted? but when, later, I was embarrassed by my sword in the middle of the little staircase, of which I have already spoken, I was obliged to hold her firmly to prevent a fall which would have been dreadful to the actors in this melancholy scene. I held the Empress in my arms, which encircled her waist, her back rested against my chest, and her hand leaned upon my right shoulder. When she felt the efforts which I made to prevent falling, she said to me in a very low tone, "You press me too hard." I then saw that I had nothing to fear for her health, and that she had not for an instant lost her senses.] Balzac employs the scene that Bausset records in order to render the Emperor ridiculous in his marriage little more than "un meuble," a piece of furniture, a broken column supporting a candelabra. The difficulty with which Bausset conceals the desire to display the great reserves of his phallic power only calls all the more attention to the Emperor's own "insufficiencies": 109 his strength is neither sufficient to raise and carry Josephine nor to command the end of her performance. Chasselat's widely circulated engraving of the scene renders the Emperor’s impotence all the more farcical (fig. 11). In it, Napoleon is represented as a companion piece to the half column that stands to the right of the background painting. At the same time, he is represented as the sole upright figure in the scene, the Imperial Column that— at the very time of the Emperor's announcement to Josephine— is being erected in the Place Vendome (figs. 4-6 above). Broken thirteen years before the publication of Bausset's Memoires, the Column of Austerlitz casts its shadow over the broken marriage represented in this engraving. The sword of the victorious, columnized Napoleon has been ironically transformed into a candlestick. The Emperor has become a broken column supporting a candle a bras. Fig. 11. (page 110) Chasselat, "Josephine vient d *apprendre de Napoleon sa volonte arretee de divorcer..., (30 novembre 1809)". Paris: Bibliotheque t Nationale, Estampes. n.d. Ill The intertextual reference to Bausset1s description functions to identify the Emperor's "insufficient strength" with the "insufficiency" of his marital union. In contrast, the structure of the miracle play as it appears in the narrative proper imparts to this particular comic narrative an allegorical structure. The allegorical figuration of the text prepares us to accept • » the necessity of the dissolution of the marriage, as well as the necessity of erasing all traces of Imperial impotence. The breaking of the column/Emperor can be read as the condition prereguisite to the crowning of the Column/Emperor with the allegorical figure of Peace that t Balzac, if not Napoleon, had the power to effect. As I have suggested above, the allegorical figure is presented in the young woman to whom attention has been successfully turned. Repeatedly referred to as "la dame i bleue" and "l'inconnue" [the lady in blue and the unknown] (996; 998; 1003; 1004; 1006 ...), she is described in terms of purity and devotion. Her soul is j I "ingenue" and "candide" (1025); her actions are motivated I I by "a pure love" (1025); "the corruption of society makes j her sick at heart" (1025). Her desire is that of a j mediatrix: she wishes to intercede for a husband who has not only begun an adulterous affair with another woman, but given this woman a diamond belonging to the Virgin. 112 The mediatrix enters society for the sole purpose of redeeming the profaned symbol of pure love, securing her husband*s repentance, and granting him forgiveness ("la clemence," 1026). Doing this, she will have staged an eleventh hour salvation; she will have refigured the farcical and tragic as the divinely comedic. Or so she would have were it not for the closing of the narrative frame. Balzac does not discover an aesthetic alchemy that would release la comedie humaine into the realm of la divine comedie. He does, however, articulate such an alchemy in 183 3 when, on 17 November he writes to Madame Hanska: J*y ai vu le plus beau chef-d'oeuvre qui existe. C'est Marie, tenant le Christ enfant adore oar deux anges... La j1ai congu le plus beau livre, un petit volume dont Louis Lambert serait la preface, une oeuvre intitulee: Seraphita. Seraohita serait les deux natures en un seul etre, comme Fragoletta. mais avec cette difference que je suppose cette creature un ange arrive a sa derniere transformation et brisant son enveloppe, pour monter aux cieux. II est aime par un homme et par une femme auxquels il dit, en s'envoiant aux cieux, qu'ils ont aime l'un et 1*autre 1*amour qui les liait, en le voyant en lui, ange tout pur; et il leur revele leur passion, leur laisse 1*amour, en echappant a nos miseres terrestres. Si je le puis, j'ecrirai ce bel ouvrage a Geneve, pres de toi... [I have seen the most beautiful work of art that exists. It is Marv. holding the Christ child. adored bv two angels... Looking at it, I conceived of the most beautiful book, a little volume of which Louis Lambert would be the preface, a work entitled: Seraphita. Seraohita would be two natures in a single being, like Fragoletta. but with the difference that I imagine this creature to be an angel who has reached the final stage of transformation and, breaking through that which envelops it, mounts to the heavens. It is loved by a man and by a woman to whom it says, as it flies into the heavens, that together they have loved the love that united them, seeing in it something angelic and pure; and it reveals to them their passion, leaving them love as it escapes our terrestial miseries. If I can I will write this beautiful work in Geneva, close to you...] (Balzac, Lettres a 11Etrangere I, 312-313) J The hermaphroditic, allegorical refiguring of Napoleon in La Paix du menage is condemned to failure by the text's own inescapable historicity. For all the j i i power, and indirection, of Balzacien desire, the Princess | Schwartzenberg dies a horrifying death. For all the power, and indirection, of Balzacien desire, the allegorical figure of Peace will never be mounted on the Vendome Column. The miracle play staged inside the narrative proper is powerless to break through the temporal envelope that surrounds it. The horror of historicity, however, has been tamed for the moment: as Balzac writes, the failure to have created a divine 114 comedy renders tout ce qui brille "comme des flambeaux amenes dans les denouments de tragedie" [like the torches brought on at the end of a tragedy] (1011). 115 Notes (Chapter II) 1 Baudelaire gives a postitive valuation to the mechanical in art when, in "L*Oeuvre et la vie d"Eugene Delacroix" ["The Work and the Life of Eugene Delacroix"] he writes: La Flandre a Rubens, l'ltalie a Raphael et Veronese; la France a Lebrun, David et Delacroix. ...une espece de fraternite ou de cousinage derivant de leur amour du grand, du national, de 1*immense, et de l'universel, amour qui s'est toujours exprime dans la peinture dite decorative ou dans les grands machines. Beaucoup d'autres, sans doute, ont fait de grandes machines; mais ceux-la que j'ai nommes les ont faites de la maniere la plus propre a laisser une trace eternelle dans la memoire humaine." (530) [Flanders has Rubens, Italy has Raphael and Veronese? France has Lebrun, David and Delacroix. ...a type of brotherhood or cousinage derives from their love of the great, national, immense and universal, a love that has always expressed itself in painting that is called decorative or in the great machines. A lot of others, doubtless, have created great machines; but those who I have named have created them in a manner most appropriate to leaving an eternal trace on the human memory.] The positive valuation of the machine provides an early modern instance of the dissociation of the machine from "despotic, technical perfectionism" as well as from the didacticism and rationality of French Classicism. i 2 Representations of the "breaking" or "halving" < the Vendome Column were widely circulated in Europe, Britain, and America throughout the nineteenth century. The association of the broken column with impending disaster is so strong that, fifty years after the end of 116 the First Empire, fifty years after the government forces Launay to remove Napoleon's statue from the Column of Austerlitz, Karl Marx, foretelling the collapse of the Second Republic, closes The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte with this final sentence: "...when the imperial mantle finally falls on the shoulders of Louis Bonaparte, the bronze statue of Napoleon will crash from the top of the Vendome Column." When, then, Balzac writes "...il est certain que, hommes et femmes, tous se precipitaient dans le plaisir avec une intrepidite qui semblait presager la fin du monde" [men and women alike rushed into pleasure with an intrepidity that seemed to foretell the end of the world] (992-3), and sets that description into relation with the figure of "une colonne brisee," he necessarily invites a metaphoric reading of the column as the Column of the Grand Army, the Column of Austerlitz, or the monument that today is known as the Vendome Column. o , , , Parenthetical documentation of Balzac's La Paix du menage includes only the author's name and the appropriate page numbers; all citations are to volumn one of the Pleiade edition of La Comedie humaine. In the case of all other documentation of Balzac's texts, full parenthetical citation is provided. 4 In arguing this point, I am responding to a fundamental claim in Riffaterre's theory of textual analysis: "L'explication de 1'enonce ne doit pas etre une description des formes de cet enonce, c'est-a-dire une grammaire, mais la description des composantes de 1'enonce qui provoquent des rationalisations... . L'explication pertinente de la rationalisation consistera d'abord a accepter celle-ci comme modalite de la perception du texte, done a reconnaitre qu'elle est de nature linguistique. La confirmer consistera a montrer que les mots l'imposent. L'infirmer, a montrer que les mots ne l'imposent pas. Qu'elle soit une erreur sur le plan des choses importe peu, si cette erreur est realite sur le plan de la representation. [The explanation of an utterance should not be a description of its forms, or a a grammer, but rather a description of those of its components that prompt rationalizations. ... A relevant explanation of a rationalization will consist first in accepting the rationalization as a way of perceiving the text and, therefore, in recognizing that it is linguistic in nature. We can confirm it by showing that the words impose it on us, and we can disprove it by showing that the words do not. It matters little that the rationalization may be a mistake in relation to things as long as that mistake is reality in relation to the representation of things.] (La Production 9) Central to this chapter is the argument that rationalization can be separated from the formal conventions of historicizing ideologies, genres, or grammars only at great, and impoverishing, expense to the text. See Marc Eli Blanchard's "Up Against the Text" (Diacritics. 11, 13-26) for an excellent discussion of "the progressive derealization of the referent" in Riffaterre's texts. I am indebted to Blanchard for having called my attention to Riffaterre's treatment of Balzac's La Paix j du menage. I read "Up Against the Text" in 1981, after j I had read Semiotics of Poetry and before I had read La I Production du texte." My introduction to the narrative, therefore, followed an appropriately indirect path: it was only after having read La Production du texte that I read Balzac's La Paix du menage. ! I trace my history with the three texts, in order to ( draw attention to a problem that writers and readers of I literary theory encounter with increasing frequency. In the process of advancing an argument, theorists will very often provide a literary "example" in support of a theoretical claim? their readers, however, will just as often fail to familiarize themselves with that literary example. The result, in the case of La Paix du menage, is that a theoretical argument is advanced on the 118 questionable grounds of a theorist*s own poetic misprisions. The present chapter is largely a response to the fact that when I did read Balzac*s La Paix du menage, I could only recognize it as the text discussed by Riffaterre and Blanchard with difficulty. 6 For the Emperor's own fears respecting the prophetic nature of the conflagration see Bausset. While it seems to me that, in the aftermath of structuralism, no competent study of narrative can be conducted outside the taxonomy of Gerard Genette's Figures, it also seems to me that the technocratic bias with which that taxonomy is informed is largely responsible for the type of misprision we find in Riffaterre's reading of Balzac's text. For that reason, I have attempted to produce an analysis of the text which is informed with Genette's distinctions while remaining free of its oppressively mechanistic taxonomy. It does not seem to me that by retaining a term such as the narrative frame, or by resisting a term such as extradiegetic levels of narration, I blur distinctions. Rather, it seems to me that I remain closer to the text's own taxonomy of narrative strategies. o Riffaterre takes no account of the text's own reference to Isabey— the designer of the candelabra as well as of the coronation ceremonies and the painter of the portraits on the Table d'Austerlitz. Rather, Riffaterre notes the following: L'eclairage eblouissant et somptueux est un lieu commun des descriptions de bals et du grandes receptions au dix-neuvieme siecle; voir le cliche eclairer a criorno (par exemple, Balzac, Sarrasine. Pleiade, t. VI, p. 79? Flaubert, Madame Bovary. I, viii). La difference ici, c'est qu'a propos d'eclairage il y a description detaillee et focalisation. (157) [Dazzling and sumptuous lighting is a commonplace in descriptions of balls and formal receptions in the nineteenth century; see the cliche to light up as 119 bright as day (for example, Balzac, Sarrasine. Pleaide, t. VI, p. 79; Flaubert, Madame Bovarv I, viii). The difference, here, is that a detailed and focalizing description is attached to the light.] My quarrel with Riffaterre is succinctly summarized by the two examples of "descriptions de bals et du grandes receptions au dix-neuvieme siecle." There are more appropriate examples to draw upon: Bausset's elaborate description of the blazing candelabra that falls at the feet of the Princess de Schwartzenberg, during the ball celebrating the marriage of Napoleon to the Austrian Archduchess, strikes me as as a comparison that the text, itself, makes. See Phillip W. Sergeant's comment to this effect: "the remarkable scene described by the Palace prefect Bausset,...turns the whole tragedy of the situation into a comedy" (287). 120 Chapter III "The Figure That Fascinates": Walter Benjamin and the Prayer for the Little Hunchback In a letter to Gretel Karplus written in August of 1935, Benjamin conceded that the subtitle he had imagined giving to the Arcades project was "unerlaubt >>dichterische«" [impermissibly poetic] and would have to be revised (GS, V, 1138). The title was "A Dialectical Fairy Scene."1 In a letter to Adorno written in May of the same year, however, Benjamin nevertheless permitted himself to give the project these Proustian shades: [...] von dem ich des abends im Bett nie mehr als zwei bis drei Seiten lesen konnte [Louis Aragon*s Surrealist novel, Le Pavsan de Paris], weil mein Herzklopfen dann so stark wurde, dass ich das Buch aus der Hand legen musste [...]. Und doch stammen die ersten Aufzeichnungen zu den Passagen aus jener Zeit.— Es kamen die berliner Jahre, in denen der beste Teil meiner Freundschaft mit Hessel sich in vielen Gesprachen aus dem Passagenprojekt nahrte. Damals entstand der [...] Untertitel ,,Eine dialektische Feerie.'' (Briefe. II, 663) [...E]venings in bed I could not read more than a few words of [Louis Aragon*s Surrealist novel, Le Pavsan de Paris], before my heartbeat got so strong that I had to put the book down [...]. And in fact the first notes of the Passagen come from this time. Then came the Berlin years, in which the best part of my friendship with [Franz] Hessel was 121 nourished by the Passagen-project in frequent conversations. From that time came the subtitle: A dialectical Fairy Scene.]2 j Ten years earlier, after having been forced, by his i committee at the University of Frankfurt am Main, to withdraw his petition for the Habilitation, Benjamin wrote a new preface to the Trauerspiel study and sent it to Gershom Scholem. As it illustrates, the desire to write "impermissibly poetic" "fairy scenes" was anything but passing: Ich mochte das Marchen vom Dornroschen zum zweiten Male erzahlen. Es schlaft in seiner Dornenhecke. Und i dann, nach so und so viel Jahren wird es wach. Aber nicht vom Kuss eines gliicklichen Prinzen. Der Koch hat es aufgeweckt, als er dem Kiichenj ungen die Ohrfeige gab, die, schallend von der aufgesparten Kraft so vieler Jahre, durch das Schloss halite. Ein schones Kind schlaft hinter der dornigen Hecke der folgenden Seiten. Dass nur kein Glucksprinz im blendenden Riistzeug der Wissenschaft ihm nahe kommt. Denn im brautlichen Kuss wird es zubeissen. Vielmehr hat sich der Autor, es zu wecken, als Kiichenmeister selber vorbehalten. Zu lange ist schon die Ohrfeige fallig, die schallend durch die Hallen der Wissenschaft gellen soli. Dann wird auch diese arme Wahrheit erwachen, die am altmodischen Spinnrocken I sich gestochen hat, als sie, | verbotnerweise, in der Rumpelkammer einer Professorentalar sich zu weben gedachte. (Briefe, I, 418) 12 [I should like to tell, for a second time, the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty. She slept in her thorn bush. And then, after so and so many years, she awoke. But not by the kiss of a fortunate prince. The cook woke her up, as he gave the young cook a box in the ears that resounded through the castle, ringing from the pent-up energy of so many years. A beautiful child sleeps behind the thorny hedge of the following pages. Just don't let any prince of fortune decked out in the dazzling equipment of knowledge come near it. For in the bridal kiss, it will snap at him. Much better that the author should awaken it, reserving for himself the role of head cook. For too long the box in the ears has been due, that with its shrill ring would pierce through the halls of knowledge. Then, too, would this poor truth awaken, that has pricked itself on the I outmoded spindle as, forbiddenly, it thought to weave itself into the rattletrap chambers of a professor's gown.] Fifteen years later, during the final year of his life, | the "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen" was published. j Like the Trauerspiel study, it too began with a figure from a fairy scene— the hunchback— and, doing so, bore i ; witness to the most persistent of Benjamin's textual j preoccupations.3 Whether he was writing about the Paris arcades and Baudelaire, as he was in the Passaqen-Werk. about German tragedy and allegory, as he was in the Trauerspiel study, or about historical materialism and its relation to a messianic theology, as he was in the 123 1 I "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen," he was searching for j i a way to tell "impermissibly poetic" stories about the world in which he lived, the literature that he loved, and the future he could only sometimes imagine.4 i In the pages that follow, I want to argue that i Benjamin's preoccupation with dialectic fairy scenes makes his work into a model case for examining "the very narrow gate" through which the "impermissibly poetic" might be said to enter into a discursive relation with the permissibly hermeneutic methods of both a Marxist dialectic and a messianic theology.5 I want, further, to argue that the success or failure of a compatibility between a poetics and a hermeneutics in the work depends upon finding a way to allow the narrow gate to swing in both directions. What I hope to show is that, to the extent that the writing succeeds, it does so as the result of a stylistic performance— a performance that does what it cannot say, theorize, or philosophize, and that, so doing, blurs the boundaries that define and ! stabilize the material and theological discourses even as j it makes claims for the inviolable and monumental cognitive meaning that these discourses organize. I Before turning directly to my own argument, I would like to address the value in adding yet one more interpretive study to the already daunting number of essays and books dedicated to Benjamin*s texts. To do so, I will offer two quotations: the first is from Jurgen Habermas's "Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik— die Aktualitat Walter Benjamins** and summarizes Habermas's critique of the "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen"; the other is from Asja Lacis's Revolutionar im Beruf: Berichte uber oroletarisches Theater, iiber Meverhold. Brecht, Beniamin. und Piscator and summarizes Lacis's evaluation of Benjamin's Habilitationsschrift.6 Meine These ist, dass Benjamin seine Intention, Aufklarung und Mystik zu vereinigen, nicht eingelost hat, weil der Theologe in ihm sich nicht dazu verstehen konnte, die messianische Theorie der Erfahrung fur den Historischen Materialismus dienstbar zu machen. Soviel, meine ich, ist Scholem zuzugeben. (Habermas 207) [My thesis is that Benjamin did not resolve his intention to unite Enlightenment [rationalism] and mysticism, because the theologist in him was not able to understand how to make the Messianic theory of experience serviceable for historical materialism. So much, I feel, must be granted to Scholem.] Obwohl die Schrift richtig akademisch aussieht, mit gelehrten Zitaten, [...] gespickt ist und sich auf ein ungeheures 125 Material bezieht, so ist dennoch ganz klar, dass dieses Buch kein Gelehrter geschrieben hat, sondern ein Poet, der in die Sprache verliebt ist [...] (Lacis 49) [Although the work looks properly academic, laden with learned quotations,...and relates to a vast material, it is still fully clear that no scholar wrote this book, but a poet who is in love with language...] I cite the first because, in it, Habermas gives expression to the terms in which dialectic criticism continues to understand the hermeneutic model that informs Benjamin's conception of history and politics. : j Most significantly, it ignores the place of poetic language in Benjamin's work and, in particular, the distinction that Benjamin makes between "Sprache iiberhaupt und [...] die Sprache des Menschen" [language as such and [...] the language of man" (on the basis of \ i 1 . . . . i j this distinction Benjamin claims that "es gibt [...] j i keinen Sprecher der Sprachen" [languages [...] have no j t speaker] (GS II, i, 142) and Paul de Man argues that from the beginning paragraph of "The Task of the Translator," ! i "Benjamin says [...] that it is not at all certain that I i ! language is in any sense human" (Resistance to Theory. 8 . . . . i 87)). I therefore cite the second because, in it, Lacis j gives expression to the "poetic" terms of Benjamin's 126 j I stylistic performance— the terms outside of which j Benjamin was never able to express his theories of either j a dialectic issuing from an "Enlightenment rationalism" . . . • • . Q or a theology issuing from a religious "mysticism."^ As I have noted above, my point in juxtaposing the two quotations is neither to place them into a dialectic relation nor to situate them in relation to one another according to the formalist logic of contradiction and identity. Rather, my purpose is to argue (1) that Benjamin*s texts are situated at a crossroads defined by what Habermas terms an Enlightenment rationalism and mysticism, on the one hand, and what Lacis terms a poetic, and irrational, love for language, on the other and (2) that far from organizing a site of dialectic synthesis or oppositional competition, the texts organize a discursive compatibility of contradictory discourses. Because I am neither the first to remark upon the "unfathomable, the mysterious, the poetic something" of | Walter Benjamin's texts, nor to insist upon acknowledging | . . . I the complex relation of the stylistic performance in i these texts to a hermeneutic theory of history or theology, it is important to note my particular debt to the work of such theorists and critics as Theodore Adorno, Jurgen Habermas, Gershom Scholem, Fredric Jameson, Susan Buck-Morss, Carol Jacobs, Paul de Man, and 127 Irving Wohlfarth. At the same time, however, I want to argue that such studies as they have produced are limited by the respective demand to place the contradictory discourses speaking in Benjamin's texts in either a dialectic or a hierarchical relation, to harmonize or subjugate one discourse to another, and thereby, to render Benjamin's texts consistent with, variously, a theory of historical materialism, messianic theology, or formalist poetics. The examples of the demand for consistency are numerous and pervasive; they are certainly not confined to either Habermas's hermeneutic or Lacis's poetic orientation. Paul de Man, to take one example, concludes his published lecture on "The Task of the Translator" . • in with this paragraph: ■ LU Since we saw that what is...called political and historical is due to purely linguistic reasons, we can... replace "political" by "poetical," in the sense of a poetics. For we now see that the nonmessianic, nonsacred, that is the political aspect of history is the result of the poetical aspect of language, so that political and poetical here are substituted, in opposition to the notion of the sacred. To the extent that such a poetics, such a history, is nonmessianic, not a theocracy but a rhetoric, it has no room for certain historical notions such as the notion of modernity, which is always a dialectical, that is to say an essentially theological notion. (93) 128 The demand for "poetic" consistency that we find in de Man's argument results not only in a "substitution of poetics for politics" but in the oppressively hierarchical and ideologically overdetermined claim that the political aspect of history is merely the result of the poetical aspect of language. In the following passage from Buck-Morss's The Dialectics of Seeing. however, we find that the valences are readily readjusted and the subjugation of a political discourse to a poetic discourse just as readily reversed: Every attempt to capture the Passagen- Werk within one narrative frame must lead to failure. The fragments plunge the interpreter into an abyss of meanings, threatening her or him with an epistemological despair that rivals the melancholy of the Baroque allegoricists. (I admit to not a few moments in the past seven years when yielding to such despair— or, alternatively, reveling in the semiotic free fall, under the banner of that postmodernism which already claims Benjamin as its own— seemed a delicious temptation.) Yet as I shall argue, what saves the project from arbitrariness is Benjamin's political concern that provided the overriding orientation for every constellation. (54) The problems inherent in a demand for consistency— whether the demand comes from a poetic or a hermeneutic orientation— have repeatedly resulted in the imposition of an ideologically motivated and analytically limited design. I want, then, to make one final point before moving to a reading of Benjamin's texts that allows for contradiction without threatening the interpreter with an "epistemological despair," and to do so, I will draw on Susan Buck-Morss's critical response to Jurgen Habermas's critique of the place of "theology" in Benjamin's writing. In his study of the "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen," Habermas reads "redemption" in Benjamin's texts as constituted by "das semantische Potential, aus dem die Menschen schopfen, um die Welt mit Sinn zu belehnen und erfahrbar zu machen" [a semantic potential from which human beings draw in order to invest the experiential world with meaning] (202). He writes that Benjamin believed that if "die semantischen Energien des Mythos" [the semantic energies of myth] were lost to humanity, "die poetische Fahigkeit, die Welt im Lichte menschlicher Bedurfnisse zu interpretieren" [the poetic capacity to interpret the world in the light of human needs] would thereby be denied (205). Buck-Morss's commitment to an "overriding dialectic and political orientation" leads her to accept Habermas's study as a critique of materialism" and to argue that Habermas's analysis of the failure might have been very different were he to have considered "how, for Benjamin, theology functions as an axis of philosophical experience, and how this differs 130 from the function of ‘religion' as part of the ideological superstructure" (248). Although she argues against Habermas, Buck-Morss adopts the terms of his argumentation and ends, like him, by subjugating poetics to politics. Nonetheless, all the while the acknowledged terms of their respective arguments are strictly those of "theology" and "historical materialism," the unacknowledged terms are specifically those of semantics and poetics; all the while Buck-Morss notes Habermas's need to speak of "semantic energy" and "poetic capacity" in the work, she follows his lead and cuts a dialectic path through Benjamin's texts, subjugating their poetics— under the authority of a preferred hermeneutic orientation— to their theological and materialist discourses. The tendency to read the linguistic and poetic j structure of language as part of either the "mystical"/ j theological or the "Enlightenment"/materialist poles of the dialectic leads Buck-Morss toward an ever more well ( defined and overriding orientation, but also toward ever j more problematic omissions. In a note to her consideration of Habermas's critique, it leads her to write; j The fact that I am omitting from this discussion one of the most intelligent and capable writers on Benjamin, who, 131 moreover, believes precisely that Benjamin's Messianism and his Marxist politics were one and the same, requires an explanation. I am referring to the essays of Irving Wohlfarth, a brilliant reader of Benjamin's texts. Like de Man, Wohlfarth's method is textual criticism, not philosophical analysis. Despite recent attempts to disregard the boundary between fields, I believe there is a difference, one that precisely in interpreting so "literary" a writer as Benjamin must be considered. ... For this reason, a totally immanent, esoteric interpretation of Benjamin's texts, while adequate as a literary reading is not so as a philosophical reading. The latter stubbornly rivets its attention on what is represented not merely how. That being said, let me add that I recognize that in contrast to his nuanced analyses my own may bear the Brechtian stigma of "coarse thinking" (plumpes Denken). (451-452) In this note, however unintentionally, Buck-Morss identifies the final inadequacy of "overriding orientations" to the demands of interpretation. In it, however unconsciously, she explains the pressing need— for philosophy as well as literary theory to push itself toward the articulation of theories that will render the "information" brought to light by the powers of rational cognition compatible with the poetics that i exceeds its grasp. As long as we continue to impose overriding orientations on the texts we read, we will find ourselves, as Buck-Morss does, at risk of dismissing the very arguments we consider most "intelligent," "capable," and "brilliant"; we will find ourselves mastered by ideological postures too smooth to brush against the grain of texts— like Benjamin's— that exceed the cognitive boundaries of ideological orientations. II In the following pages, what I therefore propose is a consideration of Benjamin's work that asks how the texts organize a compatibility between the general poetics of language addressed by Lacis and the general hermeneutics of language addressed by Habermas. To do so, I will turn to the first thesis of the "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen." My purpose in starting here is double: I introduce the thesis as an exemplum of Benjamin's attempt to effect a compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics of language, but I also introduce it as an exemplum of a stylistic performance— a particular instance of the figurative indirection that gives the form and shape of distortion to the contradictory discourses of Benjamin's writing. I will proceed by localizing a specific and recurrent figure in Benjamin's work— a figure in which a number of contradictory discourses speak at once but in which the 133 contradiction does not give way to competition or the imposition of an overriding orientation. Bekanntlich soil es einen Automaten gegeben haben, der so konstruiert gewesen sei, dass er jeden Zug eines Schachspielers mit einem Gegenzuge erwidert habe, der ihm den Gewinn der Partie sicherte. Eine Puppe in tiirkischer Tracht, eine Wasserpfeife im Munde, sass vor dem Brett, das auf einem geraumigen Tisch aufruhte. Durch ein System von Spiegeln wurde die Illusion erweckt, dieser Tisch sei von alien Seiten durchsichtig. In Wahrheit sass ein buckliger Zwerg darin, der ein Meister im Schachspiel war und die Hand der Puppe an Schniiren lenkte. Zu dieser Apparatur kann man sich ein Gegenstuck in der Philosophie vorstellen. Gewinnen soli immer die Puppe, die man »historischen Materialismus<< nennt. Sie kann es ohne weiteres mit jadem aufnehmen, wenn sie die Theologie in ihren Dienst nimmt, die heute bekanntlich klein und hasslich ist und sich ohnehin nicht darf blicken lassen. (S, I, 268) [The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was a chess master sat inside and guided the puppet1s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.] 134 Because I am interested in the stylistic, performance of the text— in the distance between what it says and i what it does— let me move directly to its oddest, most | disruptive figure: the hunchback.11 What a very excessive presence he is in the thesis; how much simpler the task of interpretation would be were he absent. Without him, the automaton, the puppet, and the chessmaster would appear, quite simply, as metaphoric figurations of a Marxist hermeneutic. These three would stand as counterparts [Gegenstuck] to "the real, living individuals" who are slaves and masters, or laborers and owners, of the means of production. The table, the system of mirrors, and the strings tied to the puppet's hands would represent the machinery that determines the production relations that join one to the other. The I automaton would be discovered as a puppet because— to | I 1 borrow from The German Ideology— in "the real life of | "real, living individuals," autonomy is an illusion? the master would be hidden because in the real life of living , individuals, "life is not determined by consciousness, : but consciousness by life" (German Ideology 415). Read in such a way, however, the thesis is rendered, like history in the hands of historicists, homogeneous and empty. That which exceeds the boundaries of a Marxist hermeneutic— the "Mut" [courage], the "Humor" 135 [humor], the "List" [cunning], and the "Unentwegtheit" [fortitude] of the "Bekanntlich” [story] itself— is obscured (S, I, 269). To read the "Bekanntlich," we must begin again by i noting that the mechanical device through which a materialist discourse enters the thesis is a poetic trope, an extended metaphor, and that if the automaton, the puppet and the chessmaster can be accounted for in terms of a Marxist hermeneutic, neither the hunchback nor I the theology with which he is associated can be. The hunchback tells us that the mechanical device must not j only be read as the vehicle of a materialist hermeneutic ; but as the poetic and descriptive figure by which this materialist discourse is related to a theological discourse. I want, then, to keep my eyes trained on that 1 which in the poetic trope joins historical materialism to j theology and poetics. To that end, I want to keep my eyes trained on the figure that is twisted apart and to argue that within the distorted, fissured, form of the fairy tale figure, the "illusion" of production relations is rendered simultaneously distinct and indistinguishable i from the "indirection" of poetic trope, as well as from the "attentiveness" of theology or prayer.12 136 In the third section of an essay on Franz Kafka written six years before the "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen,” Benjamin describes the hunchback as "das Urbild der Entstellung" [the prototype of distortion] "der Insasse des entstellten Lebens" [a man at home in distorted life]. When he writes this, he tells us that he is thinking of a story collected in Ein Landarzt [The Country Doctor] entitled "Die Sorge des Hausvaters" ["The Cares of a Family Man"]. From this text, he isolates a single figure— Odradek or "die Form, die die Dinge in der Vergessenheit annehmen" [the form which things assume in oblivion]— and associates this figure with two others, j the bug called Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis. "das ' grosse Tier, halb Lamm, halb Katzchen, fur das vielleicht j „das Messer des Fleischers eine Erlosung”ware" [the big | animal, half lamb, half kitten, for which 'the butcher's j i j knife1 might be be a release] and those in power in The ( j Penal Colony, who "bedienen sich [...]einer i j j altertumlichen Maschinerie, die verschnorkelte Lettern in j : i i j i den Riicken der Schuldigen eingraviert" [use an archaic ! i 1 apparatus which engraves letters with curlicues on the backs of guilty men]. Among the images in Kafka's stories, Benjamin concludes, "keine [ist] haufiger als die des Mannes, der den Kopf tief" [none is more frequent than that of the man who bows his head far down on his 137 chest]. "Diese Figuren [...] sind durch eine lange Reihe von Gestalten verbunden mit dem Urbilde der Entseilung, dem Buckligen" [These figures are connected by a long series of figures with the prototype of distortion, the hunchback] (GS, II, 221) . Benjamin is concerned, here, as he is later in the "Theses," with the illusory relation of labor to the owners of the means of production. He is interested in Gregor's apparent autonomy and in the invisible strings by which Kafka's character is, in fact, joined to an invisible master; he is interested in the officer's apparent autonomy and in the invisible strings by which this character is also but the puppet of an invisible master. But, in the essay "Franz Kafka," Benjamin's concern leads him to a description that associates the hunchback not only with a materialist/Marxist tradition but with "[...]der Grund des deutschen Volkstums so gut wie des judischen" [the core of folk tradition, the German as well as the Jewish] (GS, II, 222) and, in doing so, renders the hunchback, wherever he appears— whether in the essay on Kafka or the "Theses on the Philosophy of History"— as a crossroads of contradictory discourses. In the essay he is, thus, associated with a fairy tale discourse that is expressed in a folk song from which Benjamin cites the following lines: 138 When I come into my room, ] My little bed to make, I A little hunchback is I in there, I With laughter does he I shake. When I kneel upon my j stool, And I want to pray, A hunchbacked man is in the room, And he starts to say: My dear child, I beg of you, Pray for the little hunchback too. Benjamin cites the folk song as an illustration of what interests him most in "The Cares of the Family t Man"— -the laughter that effects a relation between the hunchbacked figures in the folk song, the essay "Franz Kafka," and the theses of the "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen." Referring to the last two lines of the song's first stanza, "Steht ein bucklicht Mannlein da,/Fangt als an zu lachen," he writes: "Das ist das Lachen Odradeks" \ [This is the laughter of Odradek] (GS, II, 222) . The j inferred reference is to unquoted lines from Kafka's ■ i parable in which the narrative voice, speaking to the reader, says: "Manchmal, wenn man aus der Tur tritt und [Odradek] lehnt gerade unten am Treppengelander, hat man Lust, ihn anzusprechen [...] «Wo wohnst du?>> «Unbestimmter Wohnsitz,» sagt er und lacht" [Many a Geh ich in mein Kammerlein, Will mein Bettlein machen, Steht ein bucklicht Mannlein da, Fangt als an zu lachen. Wenn ich an mein Banklein knie, Will ein bisschen beten, Steht ein bucklicht Mannlein da, Fangt als an zu reden: Liebes Kindlein, ach ich bitt, Bet furs bucklicht Mannlein mit. 139 J time when you go out of the door and [Odradek] happens just to be leaning directly beneath you against the banisters you feel inclined to speak to him. [...] 'Where do you live?1 %No fixed abode,1 he says and laughs" i I (Kafka 157). The response is crucial to an understanding of Benjamin's association of Odradek's laughter with that of the "bucklicht Mannlein"; for, it is not the laughter itself that effects the relation between the various hunchbacked figures. It is, rather, the omitted and, therefore, "distorted" response from which the laughter issues: to the question "Where do you live," the hunchback laughs and says "No fixed abode." Odradek is associated with the little hunchback of the folk song because, like him, he "laughs"; the hunchback of the folk song is associated with Odradek because, like him, he has "no fixed abode." I j Returning to the first thesis, we can now also see j that the hunchbacked chessmaster is not only a ; representation of a hermeneutic, materialist discourse, but a poetic figure linked to a fairy tale tradition— like the "bucklicht Mannlein" of the folk song, like Odradek of the parable, the chessmaster of the "Theses" knows that "Sind [. . . ] die feinen und spirituellen Dinge [...] im Klassenkampf anders zugegen denn als die Vorstellung einer Beute, die an den Sieger fallt [it 140 is not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that [. . . ] refined and spiritual things [. . . ] make their presence felt in the class struggle." He knows that "Sie sind als Zuversicht, als Mut, als Humor, als List, als i Unentwegtheit" [they manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude" (S, I, 269). Like Odradek, the hunchbacked chessmaster in the "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen" knows that he must j "never be laid hold of?" always avoid "close scrutiny?" I and above all, "keep out of sight." And this is j because, like all hunchbacked figures, like all human i i I beings, his very existence depends upon an "uncertainty of interpretation." Of the "bucklicht Mannlein" in the "Theses," we can say what Kafka says of Odradek in the opening paragraph of "The Cares of the Family Man:" Die einen sagen, das Wort Odradek stamme i aus dem Slawischen und sie suchen auf I Grund dessen die Bildung des Wortes j nachzuweisen. Andere wieder meinen, es ! stamme aus dem Deutschen, vom Slawischen sei es nur beeinflusst. Die Unsicherheit beider Deutungen aber lasst wohl mit Recht darauf schliessen, dass keine zutrifft, zumal man auch mit keiner von ihnen einen Sinn des Wortes finden kann. Naturlich wurde sich niemand mit solchen Studien beschaftigen, wenn es nicht wirklich ein Wesen gabe, das Odradek heisst. [Some say the word Odradek is of Slavonic origin, and try to account for it on that basis. Others again believe it to be of German origin, only 141 influenced by Slavonic. The uncertainty of both interpretations allows one to assume with justice that neither is accurate, especially as neither of them provides an intelligent meaning of the word. No one, of course, would occupy himself with such studies if there were not a creature called Odradek.] The hunchback's laughter is the sign of the "extraordinarily nimble" movement by which he "keeps out of sight" within a determinate system of production relations even as he is exposed as organizing an "uncertainty of interpretation." His contradictory status as "a word" [Wort] and as a "being" [Wesen] enables him to function as the crossroads upon which a poetics and a hermeneutics of language meet. It is, moreover, the contradictory status of the hunchback that allows Benjamin to associate the little men of the folk song and the parable, as well as the little man of the thesis, with a third discourse— that of prayer or theology (a discourse with God). For prayer in the essay "Franz Kafka" is defined for us as literature. Benjamin finds that the prayer for which the hunchback begs in the folk song is answered by Kafka in "The Cares of the Family Man." And the form of Kafka's prayer is essential: according to Benjamin, the form is "attentiveness— the natural prayer of the soul"— the form 142 is literature, a literature that takes its figures and form from a folk tradition. If we return, again, to the first thesis, we can see that it is the prayer of a literary text that is hidden inside the system of production relations; it is the prayer of a literary text that effects the relation not only between the hunchback and theology but between a materialist, a theologic, and a poetic discourse. It is, then, not only to the essay "Franz Kafka" that we must look but to other, more extended treatments of prayer in Benjamin's work. For that reason, I turn now to the ninth thesis of the "Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen"— that is to say, to the most celebrated treatment of "prayer" in Benjamin's work. Mein Flugel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zuriick, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich hatte wenig Gliick. — Gerhard Scholem, "Gruss vom Angelus" Es gibt ein Bild von Klee, das Angelus Novus heisst. Ein Engel ist darauf dargestellt, der aussieht, als ware er im Begriff, sich von etwas zu entfernen, worauf er starrt. Seine Augen sind aufgerissen, sein Mund steht offen, und seine Flugel sind ausgespannt. Der Engel der Geschichte muss so aussehen. Er hat das Antiitz der Vergangenheit zugewendet. Wo eine Kette von Begebenheiten vor uns erscheint, da sieht er eine einzige Katastrophe, die unablassig Trummer auf Trummer hauft und sie ihm vor die Fusse schleudert. Er mochte wohl verweilen, die Toten wecken und das Zerschlagene 143 zusammenfugen. Aber ein Sturm weht vom Paradiese her, der sich in seinen Fliigeln verfangen hat und so stark ist, dass der Engel sie nicht mehr schliessen kann. Dieser Sturm treibt ihn unaufhaltsam in die Zukunft, der er den Riicken kehrt, wahrend der Triimmerhaufen vor ihm zum Himmel wachst. Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm. [My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed full time, I would have little luck. — Gerhard Scholem, "Greeting of the Angel" There is a picture by Klee called Angleus Novus. An angel is presented in it who looks as if he were about to move away from something at which he is staring. His eyes are wide open, mouth agape, wings spread. The angel of history must look like that. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe which relentlessly piles ! wreckage upon wreckage, and hurls them before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; this storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. This storm is what we call progress.] I We see from the start that the thesis is organized \ i I as a discourse between theology and mysticism, on the one ; hand, and historical materialism and an Enlightenment aesthetics, on the other. However enigmatic we might find the relation between the two, and whether or not we find in them either "an intention to unite rationalism and mysticism" or "a failure to understand how to make 144 the Messianic theory of experience serviceable for historical materialism," we can see that the relation is organized, quite simply, by the repetition of a single poetic sign— "Angelus"— and the repetition of the trope or movement of the Angelus within the text. The "Angelus" that we find is an angel, certainly, but it is also the name of a prayer rendered in its most celebrated form by Jean-Frangois Millet: (see fig. 1) Figure 1: Jean-Frangois Millet, "L*Angelus," 1857-1859, Musee d'Orsay, Paris 145 The painting enters into my reading of Benjamin's thesis not only because it figures those who pray as hunchbacks but because it figures the human back as bent over under the weight of a particular type of prayer— an historicizing commemoration of the Annunciation. What we find in Millet's "L'Angelus" are workers whose backs are hunched not under the weight of their labor but under the weight of a "lebendige Zeit"— a time so full with history as to have become "homogeneous" and "empty" [homogene und leere] (S, I, 276). It is, thus, in search of a "Jetztzeit"— a time in which the present may be experienced— that Benjamin invokes a new angel. The citation of Gershom Scholem's greeting from the angel ["Gruss vom Angelus"] as well as the reference to Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus" allow Benjamin to bring an historicized past into relation with a "Geschichte [...] deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit, sondern die von «Jetztzeit» erfullte bildet" [history [. . . ] whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now] (S, I, 276). Together with Benjamin's own narrative description, the reference to Klee's painting and the quotation from Scholem's poem organize a three part performance whose effect is that of opening a gate through which the "impermissibly poetic" might enter into a discursive 146 relation with the materialist and theologic discourses of the "Theses." It is this performance that most clearly marks the distance separating saying and doing in Benjamin's writing and that enables the hunchback to function as the site of a compatible contradiction. The "time" necessary to this opening of the gate is one outside a Christian order, one that has filled time with a homogeneity and emptiness: citing Scholem, Benjamin tells us that if the "Angelus" remains a "lebendige Zeit," the angel of history will have little luck in opening the gate through which the "Jetztseit" might enter into history. To that end, Benjamin cites Scholem's poem and answers the hunchback's prayer with an invocation of Klee's "Angelus Novus"— and with it a new greeting, a new annunciation. The new angel "looks as if he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating." As language, the Angelus can do what Benjamin can only say; as language, the Angelus has the unique ability to look at that from which it simultaneously moves away. In the ninth thesis, it does so in the tropic movement from Scholem's "Gruss vom Angelus" to Klee's "Angelus Novus" to Benjamin's own "angel of history." The trope performs the description by repeatedly moving away from the something it is fixedly contemplating: we may start by 147 looking at Scholem*s quatrain, but we immediately find ourselves moving away from it toward Klee's painting. Even as we begin to contemplate Klee's title, however, we move away from it toward Benjamin's description. It is » to facilitate the trope that Benjamin introduces Klee's painting only by name. A reproduction of the painting would interrupt the tropic movement of the Angelus and fill time once again with an historicizing hermeneutics. The politics of Klee's surrealist project would "fix" the "Angelus Novus" in a position from which it would not be able to move away? it would cause (1) the gate opening onto the "Jetztzeit" that flashes up before us at the I crossroads of the illusion of the materialist discourse, (2) the indirection of a poetic discourse, and (3) the attentiveness of a theologic discourse to close. By conflating Scholem's quatrain, Klee's title, and his own description in the word "Angelus," Benjamin can facil itate the swinging of the gate so that the boundaries separating the various contradictory discourses are blurred even as they are drawn. Here again, then, is the conclusion of the first thesis: Zu dieser Apparatur kann man sich ein Gegenstiick in der Philosophie vorstellen. Gewinnen soil immer die Puppe, die man »historischen Materialismus« nennt. Sie kann es ohne weiteres mit jedem 148 aufnehmen, wenn sie die Theologie in ihren Dienst nimmt, die haeute bekanntlich klein und hasslich ist und sich ohnehin nicht darf blicken lassen. [One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this machine. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep out of sight.] What it tells us is that the "Bekanntlich" is an "Apparatur"— a machine. What I hope to have demonstrated in the preceding pages, however, should make the metaphoric structure and function of the machine stand i out in relief. As a poetic trope, the "Apparatur" brings into relation poetic, materialist, and theologic discourses.13 Far from setting these contradictory, distinct discourses into a competitive relation, the poetic function of the machine organizes the site of a crossroads where a poetics and a hermeneutics of language can, simultaneously, organize meaning in the text. This is the "service" [Dienst] of the hunchback as well as the theology or angel/prayer [Angelus] with which he is associated. In his twisted form, the hunchback organizes a tropic movement that is most commonly expressed in Benjamin*s texts in the form of "labor unrewarded by its fruits" (Trumble, 13). It might be represented by the human figures in Millet*s "L*Angelus." 149 As the first as well as the ninth theses tell us, however, the hunchback is also associated with a second tropic movement— one that is demonstrated by Klee1s "Angelus Novus" and Benjamin's "angel of history," that is to say, by the angel with spread wings: (see fig. 2) Figure 2: Paul Klee, "Angelus Novus," 1920 150 When the hunchbacked and spread-winged figures converge, as they do everywhere in Benjamin's writing, they create a crossroads that functions as a gate allowing us to contemplate the past even as we move toward the future— a crossroads that transforms the "lebendige Zeit,” the homogeneous and empty time, into the site of promise. It allows bent and crucified forms to take on the shape of a crossroads of compatible contradictions and possibilities— to become a sign that can fulfill the promise it represents by perpetually moving away from a past that it fixedly contemplates. 151 Notes (Chapter Three) 1 Benjamin's correspondence with both Gretel Karplus and her husband, Theodore Adorno, is published, in part, in the Gesammelte Schriften and, in part, in the Briefe. An English translation of a limited selection of these letters is found in Aesthetics and Politics. 2 Unless otherwise indicated, all English translations of Benjamin's texts are taken from the most accessible and familiar of the English sources: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Beni amin and the Arcades Proiect (Susan Buck Morss, MIT, 1989); Illuminations, (Ed. Hannah Arendt, Trans. Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969)? Reflections (Ed. Peter Demetz, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Schocken Books, 1978). 3 As Hannah Arendt has written in her introduction to Illuminations, "Wherever one looks in Benjamin's life, one will find the little hunchback. [...] In his writing and also in conversation he used to speak about the "little hunchback," the "bucklicht Mannlein." a German fairy tale figure out of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the famous collection of German folk poetry" (Arendt 6-16). * Thus, in the essay "A Portrait of Walter Benjamin," Adorno writes: "Everything that Benjamin said or wrote sounded as if thought, instead of rejecting the promises of fairy tales and children's books with its usual disgraceful 'maturity', took them so literally that real fulfilment itself was now within sight of knowledge" (Prisms 230). 5 In the final appendix to the "Geschichts- philosophische Thesen," Benjamin introduces the metaphor of "the straight," or narrow, "gate" when he writes: "Bekanntlich war es den Juden untersagt, der Zukunft nachzuforschen. Die Thora und das Gebet unterweisen sie dagegen im Eingedenken. Dieses entzauberte ihnen die Zukunft, der die verfallen sind, die sich bei den Wahrsagern Auskunft holen. Den Juden wurde die Zukunft aber darum doch nicht zur homogenen und leeren Zeit. 152 Denn in ihr war jede Sekunde die kleine Pforte, durch die ] der Messias treten konnte." [We know that the Jews were i prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter." As I will argue in the following pages, the metaphor, and the theses that lead to it, allow us to draw nearer i to Benjamin’s substitution of literature or poetry for the Torah and prayers that instruct us in remembrance and direct our relation tg the future. Like the sacred prayers issuing from the Torah, the secular prayers issuing from poetry strip the future of its magic or power to mystify even as they exceed the boundaries of rational cognition and work the gate, through which the future both enters and recedes, upon its hinges. Benjamin's substitution of poetry for theology results in what might more properly be termed "counsel." I borrow this term from the essay entitled "Storytelling": ("Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.") Because of its etymological associations with prayer (theo + logos), Benjamin employs the term "theology" when, in fact, I believe he means something much closer to counsel. As we will see later in this chapter, the hunchback of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History" cannot be associated with the Angelus without the mediation of the term "theology." I therefore retain the term "theology" throughout this chapter; elsewhere, however, I have substituted the term "counsel." 6 Asja Lacis was Benjamin's second wife. She was a j Bolshevik from Latvia, active in postrevolutionary Soviet culture as an actress and the director of a children's theater in Moscow. During the Duma Revolution, she became a member of the Communist Party. 7 For a recent example, see Susan Buck-Morss1s The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Beniamin and the Arcades Project. I offer a more extended consideration of Buck- Morss 's response to Habermas in later pages of the chapter. 153 8 Benjamin, in fact, writes: "Was teilt die Sprache mit? Sie teilt das ihr entsprechende geistige Wesen mit. Es ist fundamental zu wissen, dass dieses geistige Wessen sich in der Sprache mitteilt und nicht durch die Sprache. Es gibt also keinen Sprecher der Sprachen, wenn man damit den meint, der durch diese Sprachen sich mitteilt. Das geistige Wesen teilt sich in i einer Sprache und nicht durch eine Sprache mit— das heisst: es ist nicht von aussen gleich dem sprachlichen Wesen. Das geistige Wesen ist mit dem sprachlichen identisch, nur sofern es mitteilbar ist. Was an einem geistigen Wesen mitteilbar ist, das ist sein sprachliches Wesen. Die Sprache teilt also das jeweilige sprachliche Wesen der Dinge mit, ihr geistiges aber nur, sofern es unmittelbar im sprachlichen beschlossen liegt, sofern es mitteilbar ist." [What does language communicate? It communicates the mental being corresponding to it. It is fundamental that this mental being communicates itself in language and not through language. Languages therefore j have no speaker, if this means someone who communicates | through these languages. Mental being communicates itself in, not through, a language, which means: it is not outwardly identical with linguistic being. Mental is identical with linguistic being only insofar as it is capable of communication. What is communicable in a mental entity is its linguistic entity. Language therefore communicates the particular linguistic being of things, but their mental being only insofar as this is directly included in their linguistic being, insofar as it is capable of being communicated.] See de Man on the "inhumanness" of language in "Walter Benjamin's ‘The Task of the Translator'" (86-88). Q , , , I cite Lacis's text because, unlike a j consideration of poetics drawn from the work of more j properly stylistic theorists such as Carol Jacobs or Paul ; de Man, it conflates that which is poetic in Benjamin's | work with his love for language— a conflation without which, in my estimation, one cannot appreciate the relation of poetics to theology in Benjamin's work. As Benjamin argues in "uber Sprache iiberhaupt und iiber die Sprache des Menschen" [On Language as Such and on the Language of Man], "Man kann von einer Sprache [...] der Technik, die nicht die Fachsprache der Techniker ist." [It is possible to talk [...] about a language of technology that is not the specialized language of technicians.] Benjamin continues, "Sprache 154 bedeutet in solchem Zusammenhang das auf Mitteilung geistiger Inhalte gerichtete Prinzip in den betreffenden Gegenstanden" [Language in such a context means the tendency inherent in the subjects concerned." The tendency inherent in Benjamin's writing is that of "attentiveness"— "the natural prayer of the soul," a sacred, albeit secularized, love. It is the series of claims made in the preceding paragraph that de Man does not consider when he writes of Benjamin that in his texts "it is not at all certain that language is in any sense human," or of Riffaterre in "Hypogram and Inscription" that "his work is like that of a scientist, or, rather of a technician addressing other technicians; his polemics can be very pointed but they involve fellow specialists whose theoretical assumptions are quite close to his own, rather than ideologues or philosophers." De Man does not allow for the possibility of a language of technology that is different from the specialized language of technicians. As a result, he fails to read the poetic disruptions in Benjamin's texts, just as he fails to read them in Michael Riffaterre's texts, as sites of the convergence of compatible contradictions. On de Man's reading of Riffaterre, see my chapter two, below. in . • . De Man is referring not only to Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator," here, but to another text entitled "Theologico-Political Fragment." An English translation of the one page "Fragment" is included in Reflections. li . . . Readers familiar with Irving Wohlfarth's essay, "Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier" (New German Critique 39 [1986]) may well see parallels between Wohlfarth's project and my own. While I am sympathetic to the isolation of recurrent figures in Benjamin's work, I do not agree with Wohlfarth that the chiffonnier or rag picker organizes a sufficient number of contradictory discourses to merit the priveleged place given him in "Et Cetera?..." While I agree that "there is a sense [my emphasis] in which the whole Passagen-werk is reflected in the 'dialectical image' of the chiffonnier," it seems to me that the rag picker, like the dialectic in whose service he functions, is a collection of fragments and that, like the dialectic, he works toward a synthesis of antitheses. My objection is to analytic methods whose j 155 integrity rests upon an exclusion of contradictory "senses." The "overriding dialectic orientation" of Wohlfarth’s article works in the service of muting the contradictory discourses that meet in the "prototype of distortion." I will argue that it is because his form is twisted apart [dis + torquere] that the hunchback is able to place so many contradictory discourses into relation. 12 Benjamin introduces the term "attentiveness" in his essay "Franz Kafka," when he writes: "In seiner Tiefe beriihrt Kafka den Grund, den weder das ,,mythische Ahnungswissen'1 noch die ,,existentielle Theologie'* ihm gibt. Es ist der Grund des deutschen Volkstums so gut wie des judischen. Wenn Kafka nicht gebetet hat— was wir nicht wissen— , so war ihm doch aufs hochste eigen, was Malebranche ,,das naturliche Gebet der Seele'' nennt— die Aufmerksamkeit. Und in sie hat er, wie die Heiligen in ihre Gebete, alle Kreatur eingeschlossen." [In his depth Kafka touches the ground which neither "mythical divination" nor "existential theology" supplied him with. It is the core of folk tradition, the German as well as j the Jewish. Even if Kafka did not pray— and this we do not know— he still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called "the natural prayer of the soul": attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all living creatures, as saints include them in their i prayers.] i i 13 I consider the term "mechanical," at length, in chapters two and three of this study. I variously place it into the context of (1) Shakespeare's rude mechanical in A Midsummer Night * s Dream; (2) Baudelaire's positive valuation of art as a "grande machine" in "L'oeuvre et la vie d'Eugene Delacroix"; and (3) de Launay's description of the machine contructed to remove, from the Vendome Column, "un des plus beaux ouvrages du statuaire qui avait ete long-temps le chef de [son] ecole." At this early point, however, let me put the term mechanical into the context of an essay that Bertolt Brecht wrote in response to Georg Lukacs's "Realism in the Balance." Brecht writes: "The word 'mechanical' need frighten no i one, as long as it refers to technique; there is a kind of mechanics that has performed great services for mankind and still does so— namely technology. The 'right thinking' people among us, whom Stalin in another context 156 spell-binding our minds with certain words used in an extremely arbitrary sense" (Aesthetics and Politics. 76) i 157 Chapter IV The Shelter of a Matrix: the Matrical and Mediatrical Closure of Comedic Structure In Part I of this study, I have been concerned with identifying a series of paradigmatic tropic constructions in which a hermeneutics and a poetics of language converge. Thus, the mecanicrue bien huilee. the colonne brisee crui support un candelabre and the angelus have occupied a central place in my considerations of the respective interpretive functions of Michael Riffaterre1s, Honore de Balzac's, and Walter Benjamin's texts. I have shown that (1) by moving toward the regularity and precision of mathematical rigor all the while it effects the metonymic "dereglement" of a Rimbaldien poetics, the "mecanique bien huilee" simultaneously organizes a blurring as well as a definition of the boundaries separating technical, poetic and banal i discourses; (2) by turning our heads from Napoleon toward "la dame bleue the "colonne brisee qui support un candelabre 158 simultaneously organizes a blurring as well as a definition of the boundaries separating political, poetic, and androgynous discourses; and (3) by turning away from the very things it fixedly contemplates, the figure of the "Angelus" simultaneously organizes a blurring as well as a definition of the boundaries separating theological/"counselory," materialist and poetic discourses. In each of the interpretive projects at which I have looked, the attempt to sustain a compatibility between a hermeneutics and a poetics of language has finally, however, been frustrated: in each case, the paradigmatic tropic constructions organize the compatibility only at the expense of metaphoric distortions, lexical and syntactic elisions, or generic transformations of the texts in which they are found. Thus, in "The Theses on the Philosophy of History," historical materialism assumes the distorting form of a messianic "theology" or prayer; in La Production du texte. technocratic rigor assumes the distorting form of censorship or disfiguration; and in La Comedie Humaine. historical 159 event assumes the distorting form of Balzac's Napoleonic aesthetic ambition.1 As a result, each of the three writers ends by producing a theory whose success depends upon the erasure of either the very history or the very literature it was intended to analyze. It is with the limitations of Riffaterre's, Balzac's and Benjamin's interpretive strategies that I will, therefore, be concerned in the concluding pages of my study. In the present chapter, I will address Riffaterre's and Balzac's respective projects; in the closing remarks, I will address Benjamin's. Throughout these final pages, I will be concerned with the relation between distortion and crenre— "genre" as both law or convention and as gender. "...there is a sense in which, let's say, hermeneutics and poetics are compatible in the somewhat paradoxical sense that they have to suffer one another in a rather strange way— in that sense metaphors of marriage might not be altogether out of place." — Dominick LaCapra In the case of both Michael Riffaterre's and Honore de Balzac's interpretive texts, the attempt to effect a compatibility of poetics and hermeneutics has been 160 advanced as an attempt to subject the irrationality of historical event to the control of a cognitively and hermeneutically imposed aesthetic closure. In both cases, the attempt to effect aesthetic closure has led to the structuring of the interpretive and fictive texts as marriage celebrations. That is to say, it has led to a structuring of the texts according to the generic conventions by which romantic and divine comedies variously conclude in a harmonious resolution of tension. In both cases, the theater in which the comedy is produced is defined by figurations of the female body: the imposition of closure has required that the irrationality of historical event be refigured as a matrix or, alternately, a mediatrix. Let me repeat: in both cases aesthetic closure has been effected by genre— by a comedic reorganization of the text and a transformation of the specific comedic structure into a figurative female body. The price exacted of this closure, however, is that of the compatibility of descriptive and interpretive analyses of texts. For both Riffaterre and Balzac can achieve genre*s aestheticized closure only by rewriting the texts they claim to interpret, only by forcing a descriptive poetics to address itself not to a language, a grammar, and a syntax that exists in the texts but one 161 that results from their own cognitive and rational acts of omission, transformation, and distortion. II ! If we return to Riffaterre's interpretive model, we see that its theoretical ends are complicitous with its generic ends— and that both require a transformation of texts into a variation of "la comedie legere." In the instance of La Paix du menage, the theoretical and generic ends also require the elision of two of the narrative's most specific and frequently repeated textual referents: the candelabra is removed from "la colonne brisee" [the broken or half column] and "la jeune femme" is dissociated from "la dame bleue" [the lady in blue]. In the preceding study of Balzac's text (see chapter three), we have seen that the elided figures— the column as well as the lady in blue— both function as historical referents. The former foretells the collapse of the Empire by pointing to the 1814 breaking of the Vendome Column as well as to the final defeat of the Bourbons and the end of the Restoration; the latter to a Restoration Catholicism and a celebration of the Mediatrix— that is to say, to a celebration of the absolute power to which she alone can appeal and by which an eleventh hour salvation can be effected. Neither the history of Napoleon and the First Empire nor the history of the Restoration under Charles X can be acknowledged by Riffaterre: both function as threats to the comedic structure and matrical closure on which his theory rests. Only that part of the text that works in the service of comedic resolution and matrical closure can be admitted into the interpretation. In the case of La Paix du menage, only a candelabra— severed from its Imperial base as well as from its Restoration associations with the Virgin's power to intercede on the sinner's behalf— can be admitted. To understand, further, the reasons for the disfiguring omissions from the text, we can return to Riffaterre's analysis of La Paix du menage. As I have shown in chapter two, the problem that textual analysis faces is one of its relation to the metonymic "monstrosity" of the literary texts it interprets. The question to which it must respond is how an analysis can express the monstrosity of the literary or poetic without assuming its face— without assuming the monstrous likeness of either the poet who "s'implant[e] et se cultivfe] des verrues sur le visage" [implants and 163 cultivates warts on his face] or the mechanical who grows "marvellous hairy about the face." Thus, Riffaterre*s interpretation begins with the location of the text*s hypogrammatic machinery— its claim to technocratic rigor. The machine (expressed in the form of a candelabra and the young woman/wife seated next to it) is identified as the repetition of a metonymy that functions as the model by which all object relations in t the story are organized. Its discovery causes a compression or condensation, not only of the story as a whole (all of its complexity and diversity is reduced to a series of variations on the hypogrammatic invariant) but of the metonymy as well— one of the words it joins is displaced. The result is that "the metonymy is transformed into a metaphor," and the candelabra is metaphorically substituted for the wife. As I have also demonstrated in chapter two, however, Riffaterre's theoretical model requires the convergence of banal, technical, and poetic discourses. The poetic i I discourse takes a double form: it is derived from the i metonymic dereglement of a Rimbaldien poetics (see my discussion of the prose poem "Bottom") and the metonymic entanglement of a Shakespearean romantic comedy (see my discussion of A Midsummer Night1s Dream). If a trope were to be presented as a metaphor without a metonymic 164 origin— as it is in the case of the metaphoric identification of la dame bleue with Napoleon— it would lack the hypogrammatic machinery by which all of the language in the narrative is made to circle around a hypothetical matrix sentence.2 More importantly, if the metonymic origin of the poetic trope were threatened, the poetic discourse in Riffaterrefs interpretive model would be lost. In other words, the metonymic and poetic irrationality of the theory would be lost; its technical and banal hermeneutic discourses would alone be brought to the text. As a result, the ability of Riffaterre's textual analysis to wind the textual features into the hypothetical matrix would be wholly undermined— and finally, this would result in the frustration of the harmonious resolution of tension that the romantic comedy staged by the convergence of technical, banal, and poetic discourses desires. By not taking into account either the Napoleonic history of the narrative frame or the repeated textual apposition of "une jeune femme" and "la dame bleue," Riffaterre is able to read Balzac's "La Paix du menage" as a romantic comedy. He is able to keep the menage of the title from pointing in the direction of the domestic affairs of France? he is able to keep the ephemeral comedic closure from going up in flames before our eyes; 165 he is able to read the menage of the title as if it | pointed only to the private affairs of the bedroom, as if J the final paragraph, in which the "happy ending" of a marital celebration is transformed into a conflagrational tragedy, had not been written. The price for this tour de force is, however, intolerable: it exacts a payment that neither history nor human beings can afford to pay. In Riffaterre’s hands, history is a cliche and female bodies are the locus of a metonymic dereglement that must be wound into J I the silent, absent space of a womb that is figured as a matrix.3 Thus, when Riffaterre looks for the text’s historical code, and listens for the textual feature that will actualize it, he finds it in "the minimal, literal and hypothetical sentence"— the matrix that isn’t there. What is absent and missing from the rigid lexical construction of "tout ce qui brille" is the matrix. The i matrix is not found in the text— it is what neither enters nor speaks until it is secured within the stabilizing boundaries of (1) the matrix and (2) comedic * closure. j This is history's fate in Riffaterre's hands. History is made the property of the female body. The fate of the female body, however, is that it is made the property of genre— in this case romantic comedy. 166 And the reason for this is that, in Riffaterre's understanding, history and female bodies, like all metonymic tropes, are rendered inimical to aesthetic expression. They must be transformed into metaphors of themselves and translated into the circumscribing form of a generic structure that will keep them forever out of the literary texts they threaten to subvert. History and female bodies must be made to shelter the aesthetic— by leaving it alone. The logic by which history and female bodies are written out of texts is not, of course, unique to Riffaterre. He is schooled by the masters of nineteenth century French literature. In other words, his logic is not unfamiliar to us— we have seen it in texts written by Balzac, for instance. Ill As we have seen in chapter three, Balzac's La Paix du menage is structured as a medieval miracle play that is framed by a catalogue of historical events and intertextual historical referents that function as the undoing of comedic resolution. Aesthetic closure has other conventions upon which to rely, however. And this is crucial to the structure of a relation between history and literature in the text. If we turn, once again, to the final paragraph of La Paix du menage, we find that historical event is simultaneously evoked and transformed by the text: Le general Montcornet n 'epousa point madame de Vaudremont, malgre la bonne intelligence dans laquelle tous deux vecurent pendant quelques instants, car elle fut une des victimes de 1 * epouvantable incendie qui rendit a jamais celebre le bal donne par 1 *ambassadeur d'Autriche, a 1'occasion du mariage de 1'empereur Napolen avec la fille de 1*empereur Frangois II. Like Riffaterre, Balzac has finally elided the historical referent— in the instance of La Paix du menage, he has placed the historical referent in the service of the generic referent and rendered an actual event (the conflagration that broke out during the wedding celebrations of Napoleon and Marie-Louise) a variation on the divine retribution evidenced by the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (a conflagration that, not incidentally, turns Lotfs wife into a "statue du sel," another kind of column or pillar). Balzac employs the metaphoric figuration of Napoleon as "une colonne brisee qui support un candelabre"— in order to succeed where Napoleon has failed and to effect the marriage of a sacred past and a secularized, profane, present ("unir le 168 present et le passe”), that is to say, to write history over in the likeness of a divine comedy. Without specific historical reference to the death of the Princess Schwartzenberg (see pages 100-101 above), the narrative frame can close by transforming the historical "epouvantable incendie" into a metaphoric variation of the Biblical conflagration visited upon Sodom and Gomorrah. The structure of the miracle play as well as the textual reference to "la fin du monde"— a reference that occurs in the first paragraph of La Paix du menage— have prepared for such a metaphoric transformation. Both have prepared us to read the comedy as a tragedy and the final conflagration as "des flambeaux amenes dans les denouments de tragedie" (1011). Both would have prepared us for this reading if it were J not for the specificity of the historical referent. That ; I specificity requires that we acknowledge the intertextual i j dialogue that takes place between Balzac1s text and the journals, letters, and memoires in which are recorded such events as the "epouvantable incendie qui rendit a ! 1 I jamais celebre le bal donne par 11ambassadeur d'Autriche, a 1*occasion du mariage de I1empereur Napoleon avec la fille de 1'empereur Frangois II." The texts of the journals, letters, and memoires, no less than the texts of medieval miracle plays, are 169 tropically figured in Balzac's Scene. They render ineffective even the author's attempt to rescue the aesthetic by turning the failure of the comedy, and then, the tragedy, into an elegy. Despite the "immensity" of La Comedie humaine, despite the ability of its author to "porte une societe...dans [sa] tete," neither the immensity of the achievement nor the head can shelter the aesthetic from actual historical event or actual female bodies. Both Riffaterre and Balzac respond to the threat of history and the female body by figuring the former in the metaphoric likeness of the latter. Both attempt to secure the literary text from that which cannot be subjected to the order, measure, regularity, and convention that guards cognition from running the risk of having to confront texts without the shelter of aesthetic distance. It is not, then, a hermeneutics and a poetics that fail to "suffer" one another, as LaCapra has suggested. In the two exempla of interpretive texts at which I've looked, it is the formalist analyst and the literary realist who have failed to "suffer" the texts they have claimed to interpret. And, the crux of the failure, in both cases, can be located in the conflation of history with figurations of the female body. To the extent that marriage is a metaphor that is "in place" 170 when we speak of the compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics, it would necessarily be a marriage between actual human beings and the actual human circumstances in which they find themselves. i i 171 Notes (Chapter IV) 1 As Balzac has written: "En somme, voici le jeu que je joue, quatre hommes auront eu une vie immense: Napoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell et je vais etre le quatrieme. Le premier a vecu la vie de 1'Europe; il s'est inocule des armeesl Le second a epouse le globe! Le troisieme s'est incarne dans un peuple! Moi, j'aurai porte une societe tout entiere dans ma tete." [In sum, in the game that I am playing, four men will have had an immense | life: Napoleon, Cuvier, O'Connell and I am going to be j the fourth. The first lived Europe's life, he injected armies into his blood. The second married the globe! The third was incarnated in a people! Me, I will carry an entire society about in my head.] (Quoted by Andre Maurois in Promethee ou La Vie de Balzac, Vol. 2. p. 5.) This is not to say that metonymic associations do not organize the circulation of the objects of desire in the Scene. It is simply to insist that the metonymic trope is only effected after the opening textual identification of Napoleon as the irreducible object of desire and the Emperor's metaphoric association with a figure capable of effecting the miracle of an eleventh i hour salvation— a miracle without which the Empire will | collapse. 3 In this regard, one of the most telling, but for all that most regrettable, of Riffaterre's theoretic claims is found in his definition of the matrix as a "doughnut.” He writes: "The significance is shaped like a doughnut, the hole being either the matrix of the hypogram or the hypogram as matrix" (The Semiotics of Poetry 13); or again "...by saying something literature can say nothing (or, if I may once more indulge in my irreverent simile: no longer the doughnut around its hole, but the doughnut as a hole)" (The Semiotics of Poetry 17). , J 172 Conclusion The Whore Called 'Once Upon a Time': the Figurative Limitations of the Essay's Illumination In respective ways, Riffaterre as well as Balzac structure a tropic convergence of discourses whose function is ultimately to protect the aesthetic shelter of a literary text from that which is irrational in both i poetics and historical event. Thus, both guard the aes thetic by organizing it according to the generic conven- I tions of comedic resolution— a comedic resolution figured as a matrix, in one case, and a mediatrix, in the other. j In both Riffaterre's and Balzac's texts, the | simultaneous blurring and defining of discursive ! . boundaries— a simultaneity effected by a convergence of contradictory discourses in a single trope— is circumscribed by the hermeneutic rationalism of generic J i law, order, and rule. The "do" and "do not" of genre ' refigures the contradictory convergence of discourses in ( oppositional terms. They are no longer allowed to function as contre dictions. where contre organizes both an opposition and a compatibility as in, for example, (1) sa maison est contre la mienne/cette diction est contre celle-la or (2) serrer son enfant contre soi/serrer cette • • ? . diction contre celle-la. The convergent discourses J 173 t are made to work alternately, in the service of a hermeneutic matrix or mediatrix, that is to say, a romantic comedy or a miracle play. Like Riffaterre as well as Balzac, Walter Benjamin structures a tropic convergence of discourses; like them he initiates a compatibility of a poetics and a hermeneutics of language; but, unlike them, he does not do so in order to protect the literary text from either a poetic or a historical irrationality. As a result, the need to impose generic constraints upon the interpretive text is eased. Whereas Riffaterre transforms Balzac's La Paix du menage into a romantic comedy and Balzac transforms narrative accounts of Napoleon's self-defined "faute impardonnable," his desire to "unir le present et le passe" into an elegy for the medieval miracle play, Benjamin relaxes the demand for a harmonious resolution of tension and allows the convergence of contradictory discourses to continue a simultaneous blurring and I defining of discursive boundaries. The essays are, i j therefore, not rewritten according to the proscriptions i j of any given set of generic conventions. I In spite of the "courage, humor, cunning, and wit," by which he is able to avoid the circumscription of generic convention, Benjamin is not able to secure a sustained compatibility of a poetics‘and a hermeneutics. 174 Such theorists as Fredric Jameson have traced this failure to the place and function of nostalgia in Benjamin's work, claiming that Benjamin's thought is best grasped as an allegorical one, as a set of parallel, discontinuous levels of meditation which are not without resemblance to that ultimate model of allegorical composition described by Dante when he speaks in his letter to Can Grande della Scala of the four dimensions of his poem: the literal..., the moral..., the allegorical..., and the anagogical... It will not be hard to adapt this scheme to twentieth-century realities, if for literal we simply read psychological, retaining the second, moral level as such; if for the dominant archetypal pattern of the life of Christ we substitute religion in the broadest sense of the religion of art, seeing the Incarnation now as the incarnation of meaning in language; if finally, replacing theology with politics, we make of Dante’s eschatology an earthly one, where the human race finds its salvation not in eternity, but in history itself. (Marxism and Form, 60- 6D3 Whereas Jameson's evaluation of Benjamin might well be considered an appropriate reading of Honore de Balzac, it is neither an adequate nor an appropriate reading of Benjamin.4 Because the contradictory discourses of Benjamin's texts are located in a single textual feature— the hunchback/angelus figure, for example— and because the services of a final resolution of tension are not enlisted to master that feature, Benjamin avoids the 17 very real nostalgia that might be said to inform Riffaterre's, Balzac's, and especially Jameson's texts. If we, then, look to thesis XVI of the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," we find that the discourses of historical materialism, counsel, and poetics are clearly defined even as the boundaries by which they are differentiated are blurred: Auf den Begriff einer Gegenwart, die nicht Ubergang ist sondern in der die Zeit einsteht und zum Stillstand gekommen ist, kann der historische Materialist nicht verzichten. Denn dieser Begriff definiert eben die Gegenwart, in der er fur seine Person Geschichte schreibt. Der Historismus stellt das 'ewige' Bild mit ihr, die einzig dasteht. Er iiberlasst es andern, bei der Hure 'Es war einmal' im Bordell des Historismus sich auszugeben. Er bleibt seiner Krafte Herr: Manns genug, das Kontinuum der Geschichte aufzusprengen. [A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the "eternal" image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once upon a time" in historicism1s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history."] The juxtaposition of historical materialism and historicism in thesis XVI is organized by a Marxist dialectic that allows us to identify Benjamin's text as "a version of a Marxist hermeneutic.1,5 As in the first and the ninth theses, however, a trope organizes the materialist discourse— a trope structured by a poetic discourse. And as in the earlier theses, the trope functions as a "transition." Like the angelus, it "moves away from the very thing it so fixedly contemplates" and, so doing, enacts a performance by which the boundaries separating materialist and poetic discourses are blurred. The particular form of the trope, this time, is "The whore called 'Once upon a time'." At one level, the whore is a variation on the "lebendige Zeit" to which Scholem refers in the "Gruss vom Angelus," on another, it is a negative expression of the desire for comedic resolution that we have seen before. That is to say, like the figuration of comedic resolution as a matrix or i a mediatrix, the figuration of historicism as a "whore in j a bordello" disturbs a convergence of contradictory | i discourses in the.text. The identification of historical materialism with "control of power" and, especially, with the ability to "blast open the continuum of history" returns Benjamin to the circumscriptive hermeneutics that we have seen in Riffaterre's attempts to control the matrix and in Balzac's attempts to control the mediatrix. Benjamin's attempt to control the "whore" arrests the 177 tropic movement by which the hunchback was earlier rendered indistinguishable from the angelus— from prayer or theology. As a result, it disturbs the process by which a discourse of counsel is allowed to speak. "Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom," Benjamin writes in "The Storyteller." When "real life" is figured in terms of metaphors of female bodies, however, it loses its claim to real life. The fabric by which counsel has been woven into life is created as a weave whose woof and warp are so tight that all movement is arrested and the possibilities for a compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics of language, once again, frustrated.6 178 Notes (Conclusion) 1 I am referring to ihe first sentence of Jacques Derrida's now celebrated essay, "The Law of Genre." 5 . . . • • • * In making this point, I want to distinguish between the English and the French sense of contra/contre. In English, contra functions only as a prefix and necessarily implies an oppositional and competitive relationship: thus, contradiction signifies a statement that denies the validity of another. In French, however, contre functions as both a noun, signifying an oppositional relationship, as well as a preposition, signifying a compatibility. Thus, in the case of the latter, the first two examples of usage in the Petit Larousse are (1) "Sa maison est contre la mienne" [His house is next to mine] and (2) "Serrer son enfant contre soi" [To hold one's child against oneself]. I wish, here, to introduce the French prepositional function into the English prefix. By contradiction, I j wish to say "speaking aginst" where "against" does not signify an opposition, denial, or competition but a compatibility of discourses as they face one another, press near to one another, or find themselves situated next to one another. 3 Jameson's interpretation, here, is limited in the very ways that Riffaterre*s and Balzac's interpretations are limited. That is to say, Jameson's own commitment to an ideological position, in this case, the commitment to "finding salvation in history," leads him to interpretations based upon yet another version of comedic resolution— -in this instance, utopian. 4 The ultimate model of allegorical competition described by Dante" is in sympathy with the reading of Balzac's La Palx du menage that I perform in Chapter three, above. As I have shown, Balzac, like Dante before him, winds the various levels of discursive meaning into the protective shelter of comedic resolution. 179 5 I borrow this phrase from tht title of chapter two of Jameson’s Marxism and Form. The three parts of the chapter are entitled: I. Waiter Benjamin? or, Nostalgia? II. Marcuse and Schiller? iii. Ernst Bloch and the Future. 6 Compare to this Roland Barthes’s more promising concept of "reseau" in Le Plaisir du texte. 180 Works Cited (Unless otherwise noted in the citations that follow, all translations in the preceding chapters are my own.) Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge: MIT U.P., 1990. Arendt, Hannah. Intro, to Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Balzac, Honore de. La Cornedie humaine. Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1935. Barzun, Jacques. Introduction. The Dictionary of Accepted ideas. By Gustave Flaubert, trans. Barzun. New York: New Directions, 1954. Baudelaire, Charles. Oeuvres Completes. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968. Bausset, L.F.J. de. Memo ires anecdoticrues sur 11interieur du palais de 1' empire depuis 1805 iusau1 au 1 . mai 1814 pour servir a 11 histoire de Napoleon. Tome 1. Paris: J.Tastu, 1827. 2 tomes. Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Eds. Rolf Tiedeman and Hermann Schweppenhauser, with the collaboration of Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Berlag, 1972. 7 vols. i — . Schriften. Ed. Walter and Gretel Adorno. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955. 2 vols. — . Briefe. Eds. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978. 2 vols. — . Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. i — . Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 1978. 181 Biver, Marie-Louise. "La Colonne de la Place Vendome." Le Paris de Napoleon. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1963. 162-175. Blanchard, Marc Eli. "Up Against the Text." Diacritics 11 (1981): 13-26. Borgerhoff, E.B.O. The Freedom of French Classicism. Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1950. Bremond, Claude. Logioue du recit. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1973. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Beniamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT U.P., 1989. Culler, Jonathan. "Riffaterre and the Semiotics of Poetry." The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics. 1881. 80-99. Fiedlaender, Walter. David to Delacroix. Trans. Robert Goldwater. Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1952. Genette, Gerard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972. Jakobson, Roman. "A Postscript to the Discussion on Grammar of Poetry." Diacritics (1980): 22-35. Habermas, Jurgen. "Bewusstmachende oder rettende Kritik— die Aktualitat Walter Benjamins," Zur Aktualitat Walter Beniamins. Ed. Siegfried Unself. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972. Hartman, Geoffrey H. The Unremarkable Wordsworth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Hubert, Gerard and Hubert, Nicole. Chateaux de Malmaison et de Bois Preau. Paris: Editions de la Reunion des musee nationaux, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as <1 Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1981. — . Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1974 . 182 Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis. The Penal Colony. and Other Stories. Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. New York: Schocken Books, 1948. Kafka, Franz. "Die Sorge des Hausvaters." Ein Landarzt. Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag. 1919. Knapton, Ernest John. Empress Josephine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963. Lacis, Asja. Revolutionar im Beruf: Beriche iiber proletarisches Theater, iiber Meverhold. Brecht. Beniamin und Piscator. Ed. Hildegaard Brenner. Munich: Regner & Bernhard, 1971. Man, Paul de. "Hypogram and Inscription: Michael Riffaterre's Poetics of Reading." Diacritics 11 (1981): 17-35. Rpt. in The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. — . "Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's 'The Task of the Translator'." The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Marx, Karl. Writings of the young Marx on Philosophy and Society. Ed. and Trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat. New York: Anchor Books, 1967. Launay, J.B. de. Relation des faits en reponse a la calomnie de M. Ambroise Tardieu. Paris: 1825. Bound by Harvard University Library in an unedited collection of pamphlets entitled Napoleon T i Secondary Material. Maurois, Andre. Prometh.ee ou la vie de Balzac. Vols. 1-2. Lausanne: Librairie Hachette, 1965. Montrose, Louis Adrian. "The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text." Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts. Eds. Patricia Parker and David Quint. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Bibiotheque de la Pleiade, 1954. Riffaterre, Michael. Text Production. Trans. Terese Lyons. New York: Columbia U.P., 198 3. 183 — . La Production du texte. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1979. — . Semiotics of Poetry. Advances in Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1978. — . Essais de stylistique structurale. Paris: Flammarion, 1971. — . "Describing poetic structures: two approaches to Baudelaire's 'Les Chats'". Yale French Studies 36-37 (1966): 200-242. Rimbaud, Arthur. Oeuvres Completes. Eds. Rolland de Reneville and Jules Mouquet. Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1954. Saint-Amand, Imbert de. Les Beaux Jours de 1'Imperatrice Marie-Louise. Ed. E. Dentu. Paris: Libraire de la Societe des Gens de Lettres, 1891. Sergeant, Philip W. The Empress Josephine. New York: George H. Doran Company, n.d. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night1s Dream. The Riverside Shakespeare. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974. Taylor, Ronald, trans. Aesthetics and Politics: The Key Texts of the Classic Debate Within German Marxism. London: Verso, 1977. Trumble, Alfred. The Painter of "The Angelus": A Study of the Life. Labors. and Vicissitudes of Jean Francois Millet. New York: American Art Asso., 1889 . Wohlfarth, Irving. "Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier." ew German Critigue. (1986): 143-68 j

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Creator Wolf, Elizabeth Anne (author)

Core Title The poetry of an example: Toward a compatibility of a hermeneutics and a poetics of language in the texts of Michael Riffaterre, Honore de Balzac, and Walter Benjamin

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

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