0333 781945 02 prevxiv · part ii reading kristeva, reading literature 43 3 céline’s pharmacy 45...

C o n t e n t s

General Editor’s Preface ixPreface xiAcknowledgments xiv

Part I Theoretical Grounds 1

1 The Objects, Objectives, and Objectivity of Textual Analysis 3● Kristeva in the English department 3● “Archivists, archaeologists, and necrophiliacs” 6● Formalist machines, New Critical puddings, and the “text” 8● From application to implication 15

2 The Subject, the Abject, and Psychoanalysis 19● From object to subject 19● The decentered subject and psychoanalysis 20● The subject, in the beginning 25● “Before the beginning” 30● “Neither subject nor object” 32● “Approaching abjection” 35● The sublime turn 37

Part II Reading Kristeva, Reading Literature 43

3 Céline’s Pharmacy 45● Taking it the wrong way 45● Letter bombs: the rhythms of abjection 52● Tangles and cuts: narrating abjection in Céline’s

Journey to the End of the Night 66

v i i

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● Strange fruit: the Rhetoric of Abjection in Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” 77

● Ad nauseam 85

4 Joyce’s “Quashed Quotatoes” 90● James Joyce/Julia Kristeva 90● Intertextuality, intersubjectivity, and the

death of the author 92● The Menippean and a literary tradition

of otherness 98● Transposition and the portmanteau word 107● New associations: music, the body, and the dissident 111● “a wildgoup’s chase” 116● Identification, transubstantiation, and love 119● What does it matter who’s speaking? 132

5 Wordsworth’s Tales of Love 135● Poststructuralism’s “other Wordsworth” 135● The poet at the “end of the line” 138● Kristeva and the pre-Oedipal Wordsworth 140● Reading love in the “Blessed Babe” 144● New Narcissi and a criticism to come 147

Glossary 150Notes 167Annotated Bibliography 183Bibliography 202Index 210

C o n t e n t sv i i i

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1 T h e O b j e c t s ,O b j e c t i v e s , a n dO b j e c t i v i t y o f Te x t u a lA n a l y s i s

Kristeva in the English Department

In his 1984 introduction to the Columbia University Press edition ofRevolution in Poetic Language, Margaret Waller’s partial translation ofthe massive 664-page work that earned Julia Kristeva her doctorate,Léon Roudiez makes an announcement that, in its mixture of urgencyand provocation, resembles some of Kristeva’s own most memorableassertions. He maintains that: “Julia Kristeva is a compelling presencethat critics and scholars can ignore only at the risk of intellectualsclerosis” (1).1 This call to notice is implicitly directed to readers ofEnglish, particularly those in the United States, who have perhaps“been slow in recognizing the importance of her work, for it has notbeen translated [here] as promptly as it has been elsewhere” (1). Sincethat time, the warning has been duly heeded, in the United States andthroughout the world. Indeed, more than thirty years of writing,psychoanalytic practice, and teaching on two continents have securedKristeva’s status as one of the most formidable figures in twentieth-century critical theory. To date, her work has been translated into ten languages.

A number of excellent resources are available to those who set out toexplore Kristeva’s prolific oeuvre. In English specifically, translations byRoudiez and others, Toril Moi’s and Kelly Oliver’s readers (as well astheir scholarly work), Ross Mitchell Guberman’s recent collection ofinterviews, John Lechte’s critical introduction, and John Fletcher andAndrew Benjamin’s collection of critical essays are only the mostprominent among them. Such navigational tools, however, do not

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necessarily answer the crucial, though often unspoken, question ofwhy Kristeva’s work belongs in the context in which most people firstencounter it, or why it might enrich that context. For despite the factthat most readers are introduced to Julia Kristeva in courses offered byliterature departments, her precise relevance to the study of literature –the extent to which her theory is specifically a literary theory, if it is one –has yet to be articulated fully. The fact that Kristeva has sparked somuch debate among feminist, political, and psychoanalytic thinkerscan make her place in literary studies especially hard for new readers tofathom. In his recent Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction,Jonathan Culler addresses this very problem when he outlines the gen-eral difficulty of understanding the relation between “literary theory,the systematic account of the nature of literature and of the methodsfor analyzing it” and “theory – not theory of literature, mind you; justplain ‘theory.’ ”2 He acknowledges that, for many, the latter represents“too much debate about general questions whose relation to literatureis scarcely evident, too much reading of difficult psychoanalytical,political, and philosophical texts” (1–2). Approaching Kristeva’s best-known work or that of her critics for the first time, a reader would likelyplace her in the “just plain ‘theory’ ” category, with perhaps the samenegative assessment. Just how her work might represent the former aswell – a “systematic account of the nature of literature and the methodsfor analyzing it” – poses a more difficult, but similarly important,question, which this volume aims to address.

Certainly one obvious answer is that Kristeva herself often writesabout literature, not only in presenting her theory of poetic language,but also in offering compelling accounts of abjection, melancholia,love, and other “borderline cases” of subjectivity. Kristeva’s discussionsof literature and her use of literary examples, however, rarely offer upclear models of how another reader might produce a sustained literarycriticism in her spirit. Nor do they explicitly indicate whether and whyone should. In some ways, this lack of clarity has not seemed to pose aproblem at all, for readings of literary texts “using” Kristeva havebecome a fairly regular occurrence in scholarly journals and academicbooks. Yet while acknowledging the contributions of excellent criticswhose subtlety transcends this characterization, I would also suggestthat literary commentators who invoke Kristeva tend to apply her for-mulations without giving rigorous attention to what is at stake in doingso.3 And though it is inviting to do so, reading Kristeva’s accounts ofsignification and subjective crises primarily as concepts or themes to

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identify in literary or cultural texts limits – in fact, misreads – hertheoretical contribution. We might see application as a readerly strategy,a critical stage, that is indeed a “resistance to theory,” if an eager andwell-intentioned one.4 Its next stage – determining how one mightproperly produce an informed critical reading of literary texts thatcontends with the genuine implications of Kristeva’s wide-rangingspeculations – could not be more crucial to think through deliberatelyand self-consciously.

This question about Kristeva is a version of the vexed and muchcontested question of theory’s relation to literature and literary studymore generally. A voluminous body of discourse exists on this subject,and it is not the express domain of this book to survey it. As the title ofthis volume indicates, it is, instead, an effort to consider this generalquestion by means of a particular case, one valuable for very commonand practical reasons: although initiated readers may find the need tojustify reading “theory” naïve or obsolete, for new readers it can be a for-midable and prohibitive problem. In the case of a theorist like Kristeva –prolific, eclectic, rigorous, difficult, and occasionally outrageous – theproblem has had significant effects, involving not just how her workgets used, but also how it has been situated within the academy atlarge. As Lechte, Moi, and even Kristeva herself have argued, prevailingAnglo-American assumptions that her work is essentially feminist,psychoanalytic, or political – assumptions at times used to condemnher – deny much of its full force, its full potential, as well as much of itsintellectual context.5 Not often enough do critics acknowledge thatKristeva presupposes and deploys a specific understanding of literarylanguage and representation that speaks more directly to students ofliterature than her wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary studies might attimes seem to do.

The project here will be to identify in Kristeva’s work, in its sprawling“superdisciplinary” ambition, a workably coherent theory of both lit-erary production and literary criticism.6 On the former issue, Kristevais fairly explicit, and on the latter, rarely so. But it is valuable to recog-nize that they are actually inextricable. To understand Kristeva’saccount of the way signification takes place in a literary work or acultural phenomenon necessarily involves asking how that text is to beread, how it is to be interpreted. Her work persistently engages existingdebate about critical discourse itself, most specifically by challengingtwo key assumptions: first, that language generates stable textualobjects, clear referents of the world or experience, perspicuously open

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to critical understanding; and, second, that criticism may ever stand asan authoritative meta-discourse on such texts.

“Archivists, archaeologists, and necrophiliacs”

Articulating what is typically considered a poststructuralist critique ofthose assumptions, Kristeva’s work reconceives both the object andthe objective of literary analysis, as well as the objectivity earlier liter-ary critics sought as an interpretive ideal. Roudiez’s introduction toRevolution in Poetic Language not only situates this theoretical insis-tence, but also pointedly argues that Kristeva “has something to say tothose whose principal affiliation is with ‘literary’ research,” and eventhat “she, perhaps more than others, has provided a conceptual foun-dation for significantly changing one’s approach to whatever he or shechooses to include under that vague heading” (6). To understand,however, just how her work would provide such a foundation, it helpsfirst to recognize that Kristeva herself was working from – and seekingto dismantle – the broad foundations of a linguistic theory whosedomain always included, but also extended beyond, the concerns ofscholars interested in the particular forms of literary language.

While Kristeva everywhere acknowledges her debt to linguistictheory (Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles S. Peirce, Emile Benveniste)and indeed rigorously works from its precepts, she also, as Roudiezstresses, puts pressure on its “tendency [. . .] to ‘eliminate from its fieldof inquiry everything that cannot be systematized, structured, or logi-cized into a formal entity’ ” (4). This claim is not original to Kristeva, ofcourse. Her early articulations of it are contemporary with analogouscritiques by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, andJacques Derrida. Whereas Derrida’s Of Grammatology, for example,famously explores the simultaneous orthodoxy and radicalism ofSaussure’s structural linguistics, Kristeva identifies similar fissures, sim-ilar possibilities in the work of Benveniste. She argues that Benveniste,although caught up in the formalizing trend, “nevertheless opened thisobject called language to practices in which it realizes itself, which gobeyond it, and on the basis of which its very existence as monolithicobject is either made relative or appears as problematic.”7 Questioningthe vision of language or signification as a static, “monolithic object,”Kristeva seeks to develop a theoretical discourse equipped to regard it,rather, as a complex set of “practices” – not as signification per se, but


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as a “signifying process.” Even more emphatically, she argues that alinguistic theory that supposes its object to be static overlooks the crucialinstrumentality of the subject – embodied, historical, ideological – in theprocesses that perpetually generate this supposed object. She aims,instead, for a “theory of the speaking subject.”8

Kristeva’s “Prolegomenon” to Revolution in Poetic Language deals arhetorically dramatic blow to linguistic theory’s faith in the stability ofits object of study and, in so doing, ushers in a new mode of inquiry:

The archivistic, archaeological, and necrophilic methods on which thescientific imperative was founded – the building of arguments on thebasis of empirical evidence, a systematizable given, and an observableobject – in this case language – are an embarrassment when applied tomodern or contemporary phenomena. (13; emphasis mine)

These scientists of the dead, she implies, can regard their object as suchonly by anaesthetizing it, by denying the living, material dynamism thather own theory aims to examine. In a calculated critical performance, themetaphorical shock of Kristeva’s “Prolegomenon” revives formalism’spatient etherized upon a table, by arguing that the “speaking subject”emphatically involves, in fact, a body that speaks language. Her projectthus becomes “to perceive a signifying practice which [ . . . ] refuses toidentify with the recumbent body” of the linguistic sciences – that is, tostudy the signifying practices perceptible in certain kinds of literatureand other liminal discourses which existing philosophies of languagehave “repressed” (15).9 Those philosophies “persist in seeking the truth oflanguage by formalizing utterances that hang in midair, and the truth ofthe subject by listening to the narrative of a sleeping body – a body inrepose, withdrawn from direct experience” (13). Drawing with deliberateunorthodoxy from Freudian psychoanalysis, Hegelian dialectics, andMarxian materialism, Kristeva seeks instead a “theory of significationbased on the subject, his formation, and his corporeal, linguistic, andsocial dialectic” (15).10 This critique of the formalist method of linguisticanalysis – a method Kristeva attributes to those “archivists, archaeolo-gists, and necrophiliacs” who are “[f]ascinated by the remains of aprocess” rather than by the dynamic process itself – together with theproposal she offers in its place indicate what Roudiez might have in mindwhen he suggests that Kristeva’s work offers literary studies a shift in con-ceptual foundation. And indeed, such profound shifts have already takenplace within literary studies itself: linguistics’ “sleeping” or anaesthetizedbody is perhaps literary study’s well-wrought urn.11


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Formalist machines, New Critical puddings, and the “text”

The need to re-imagine literary analysis follows from Kristeva’s critiqueof linguistic theory. For if the definition of language as a static and dis-embodied object is no longer tenable, neither are the influentialmodes of literary criticism that authorized and, in many cases, institu-tionalized themselves with the formal “objectivity” linguistics suppos-edly offered.12 Together with the linguistic emphasis she retains are atleast three key, interrelated components that distinguish Kristeva’sapproach to literature from those of her predecessors:

1 a commitment to rigorous and plural interdisciplinarity;2 an understanding of texts as dynamic “processes” involving forces

previously deemed outside the boundaries of the literary work; and3 a self-consciousness that acknowledges the implication of critical

discourse in that which it studies.

A number of her early works lay out these theoretical premises in luciddetail; see, for instance, “Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critiqueof Science” (from Séméiotiké, 1969), “How Does One Speak toLiterature?” (1971), “The System and the Speaking Subject” (1973), “TheEthics of Linguistics” (1974), and “From One Identity to Another” (1975).

She does so in the “Prolegomenon,” if somewhat telescopically,through a telling shift in terminology. “If there exists a ‘discourse,’ ” shewrites,

which is not a mere depository of thin linguistic layers, an archive ofstructures, or the testimony of a withdrawn body, and is, instead, theessential element of a practice involving the sum of unconscious, sub-jective, and social relations in gestures of confrontation and appropria-tion, destruction and construction [. . .] it is “literature,” or, morespecifically, the text. (16; emphasis Kristeva’s)

As she stresses, bracketing the term “literature” presents a method-ological challenge to “the efforts of aestheticizing esoterism andrepressive sociologizing or formalist dogmatics” to treat literary analy-sis as a discrete exercise, separate from ideological or material con-cerns, which include for her the materiality of language as well as thebody and its unconscious drives (17). More broadly, the brackets signalan ambition to transcend the established disciplinary boundaries ofliterary analysis or the formalist investment in the distinctively “liter-ary,” with all the aesthetic hierarchies that designation can imply. One


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consequence of this proposal, at once practical and theoretical, is thatit expands the domain of literary analysis – or more properly, textualanalysis – so that it may include the “poetic” dimension of discoursesof all kinds.13 Kristeva had begun to chart this domain by the late1960s. For if, as she argues in Séméiotiké, a linguistically oriented “lit-erary” study provides useful models of reading, “the new semioticmodels then turn to the social text, to those social practices of which‘literature’ is only one unvalorized variant, in order to conceive of themas so many ongoing transformations and/or productions.”14

In the immediate context of the “Prolegomenon,” Kristeva positsattention to the social or political dimensions of literary practice asone new objective of textual analysis (an objective some commenta-tors accuse her of abandoning in later work). “Hence, the questions wewill ask about literary practice,” she announces, “will be aimed at thepolitical horizon from which this practice is inseparable” (17). Thus, inRevolution in Poetic Language, moving from “literature” to “text”means practicing a textual analysis that resists the paradoxically “total-izing fragmentation characteristic of positivist discourse,” a discoursein which literary criticism could still presume its aims and objects tobe distinct from those of other disciplinary “islands” (such as econom-ics or psychoanalysis or anthropology) (15). But the methodology shecalls for aims in the other direction as well. Kristeva suggests that fromsuch a vantage point, for example, we might notice that Deleuze andGuattari, in their theoretically groundbreaking Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), draw many of their examples of“schizophrenic flow” from modern literature, “in which the ‘flow’ itselfexists only through language” (17). At once praising Deleuze andGuattari for their attention to the “de-structuring and a-signifyingmachine of the unconscious” and stressing, perhaps more than theydo themselves, the linguistic and literary dimensions of their object ofstudy, Kristeva makes a subtle point about method (17). Ideologicaland political concerns must inform critical examinations of literarytexts. But so must insistent attention to the forces that generate non-normative “signifiance” (“this unceasing operation of the drivestoward, in, and through language”) inform properly rigorous examina-tions of social systems (17).

As the Russian formalists first argued, linguistics aims to account forthe structures of “practical language,” but is inadequate to describe thedistinctive workings of “poetic language,” which functions as morethan “merely a means of communication.”15 Like the Russian formalists,


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Kristeva’s chief criticism of linguistics is that it is equipped only tostudy the kinds of language that serve “practical,” institutional socialstructures, and not discourses that exist at the margins. Yet she doesnot hold to the relatively simple opposition Russian formalists pro-pose; for Kristeva, elements of “poetic language” crop up in discoursesof all kinds. Nor does she proceed as if the laws of “poetic language”can be explained by a formalized theory that presumes an objectivityand normativity analogous to, if distinct from, that of linguistics. Bycontrast, Kristeva’s broad yet specialized concept of “poetic language” –which includes particular modes of literary language as well as otherdiscursive domains – provides a way to attend to forces that at oncegird normative structures of meaning and pose a threat to them.Kristeva’s early work especially focuses on defining “poetic language”in this way, as a “kind of language, [which] through the particularity ofits signifying operations [. . .] accompanies crises within social struc-tures and institutions – the moments of their mutation, evolution, rev-olution, or disarray.”16 On the premise that “such crises, far from beingaccidents, are inherent in the signifying function and, consequently, insociality,” she commits herself to producing a “theory in the sense of ananalytical discourse on signifying systems [ . . . ] that would searchwithin the signifying phenomenon for the crisis or the unsettlingprocess of meaning and subject rather than for the coherence or iden-tity of either one or a multiplicity of structures” (125; emphasisKristeva’s). For this reason, literary or textual analysis, as Kristevaunderstands it, must be a necessary component of the genuinely inter-disciplinary theoretical project she proposes. Analysis of “poetic lan-guage” in any of its manifestations, literary or otherwise, generates aspecific kind of theoretical knowledge Kristeva distinguishes fromwhat formalistic and humanistic sciences claimed to know.

Kristeva’s 1971 review essay on the work of her mentor and colleagueRoland Barthes, “How Does One Speak to Literature?,” explains thebasis of this very different knowledge. Both the essay’s title and itsapproach cannily ask the obverse rhetorical question as well, the veryquestion Kristeva implicitly poses elsewhere with regard to Deleuzeand Guattari. Asking how one speaks to literature means simultane-ously asking how literature speaks to us – that is, what it demands froma critical discourse genuinely responsive or responsible to it. ForKristeva, Barthes’s originality lies in his self-conscious attentiveness tosuch a demand, in both his enactment of a true interdisciplinarity indefining “the key role of literature in the system of discourses” and his

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understanding that the new methods developed from shiftingdisciplinary boundaries engender an altogether different object ofstudy.17 Like Kristeva, Barthes dwells most insistently on a historicalmoment that seems on the verge of upheavals at once linguistic, aes-thetic, political, and intellectual. His importance derives, she argues,from his being among the first to recognize that

The investigation of these contemporary ideological upheavals hingeson a knowledge of the literary “machine.” [ . . . ] He is the precursor andfounder of modern literary studies precisely because he located literarypractice at the intersection of subject and history; because he studiedthis practice as symptom of the ideological tearings in the social fabric;and because he sought, within texts, the precise mechanism thatsymbolically (semiotically) controls this tearing. He thus attempted toconstitute the concrete object of a learning whose variety, multiplicity,and mobility allow him to ward off the saturation of old discourses. Thisknowledge is in a way already a writing, a text. (93)

Here, as throughout this essay, Kristeva highlights Barthes’s studiousregard for the “literary ‘machine’ ” as something demanding a criticalinquiry that is specialized without being disciplinarily discrete. In conse-quence, this approach produces a “knowledge” that is never as absoluteas the presumptive knowledge gained by a positivist science or even a lit-erary criticism with scientific pretensions. Along with questioning theborders between disciplines, in other words, comes an important chal-lenge to assumptions about what delimits the literary “object” itself andabout just what sort of operations it involves. In this regard, Kristeva’sspecific terminology here offers a felicitous contrast: Barthes’s under-standing of the “literary ‘machine’ ” and its “precise mechanisms” differsfundamentally, for example, from that which informs Wimsatt andBeardsley’s New Critical effort to isolate the “knowledge” offered by liter-ature’s so-called “verbal icon.” In “The Intentional Fallacy,” they polemi-cally assert the need to establish literary criticism as a scientific disciplinefree from subjective or contextual concerns – such as authorial “inten-tion” or readerly associations – by famously proposing that “Judging apoem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.”According to this formulation, the literary object pre-exists interpretation(“A poem should not mean but be”) and “works” or doesn’t work because“it is, simply is” – the product of a “complex of meaning [ . . . ] handled allat once.”18 Barthes and Kristeva, by contrast, emphasize not what litera-ture “is,” but rather what it does; they regard it not as a product, butinstead as a production, “always in the process of becoming.”19

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For Kristeva, Barthes’s contribution to literary study stems primarilyfrom his premise that any given literary work is indeed, in some sense,always a work in progress or in process, subject to a complex of forcesthat were, for Wimsatt and Beardsley, discernibly either “internal” or“external” to the literary object. The theories of both Barthes andKristeva, by contrast, insist on a dynamic rather than a static vision ofthe literary work and its workings; it can never be “handled all atonce.”20 And indeed “work” is perhaps a misleading term altogether,unless we persistently approach this “work” as a working that includesthe critic’s work as well.

On this issue, Barthes’s essay “From Work to Text” helpfully illumi-nates what is at stake in the “Prolegomenon” when Kristeva shiftsfrom “literature” to “text,” or when she observes that with Barthes, “ ‘Literature’ becomes writing” (94). As does Kristeva’s “Prolegomenon,”“From Work to Text” asserts that a “certain change has taken place (oris taking place) in our conception of language and, consequently, ofthe literary work,” a change Barthes attributes both to the epistemo-logical “break” brought about by Marx and Freud and to more recentinterdisciplinary engagements among Marxism, psychoanalysis, lin-guistics, and anthropology (154, 155).21 Likening this break in thehuman sciences to that wrought by Einstein’s theory of relativity in thephysical sciences, Barthes argues that

the combined action of Marxism, Freudianism and structuralismdemands, in literature, the relativization of the relations of the writer,reader and observer (critic). Over against the traditional notion of thework, for long – and still – conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way,there is now the requirement of a new object [ . . . ] That object is theText. (156)22

The distinction between “work” and “text” is not meant to privilegecertain novels or poems, authors, genres, or periods of literary pro-duction over others. It is not, Barthes says, a matter of “declaring cer-tain literary productions ‘in’ and others ‘out.’ ” Instead, distinguishingthe “work” from the “text” says as much about a specific methodolog-ical approach to literature as it does about the object it would study.23

In the first of the seven propositions through which he defines thisidea of the “text,” Barthes writes:

The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying apart of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a method-ological field. [ . . . ] the one is displayed, the other demonstrated.


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Likewise, the work can be seen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in examsyllabuses), the text is a process of demonstration, speaks according tocertain rules (or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand,the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse(or rather, it is Text for the very reason that it knows itself as text); the textis not the decomposition of the work, it is the work that is the imaginarytail of the Text; or again, the Text is experienced only as an activity ofproduction. (156–7; emphasis Barthes’s)

Along with other influential theorists, Kristeva has spent decades out-lining and elaborating what such an activity entails, but like Barthes,she regards it as a complicated, “heterogeneous practice” that puts oldtexts in dialogue with new and involves the reader as well as the “writ-ing subject,” a subject shaped jointly by the forces of history, ideology,the unconscious, and the body.

Barthes subsequently builds upon a textual dynamism key to post-structuralist theory and goes on to highlight other premises on whichKristeva also depends. In the second proposition he argues that “theText does not stop at (good) Literature; it cannot be contained in a hier-archy, even in a simple division of genres,” and he proposes instead thatthe function of the text is to subvert these traditional divisions (157).George Bataille, whom Kristeva studies as well, serves as Barthes’sexample of someone writing at the limits of discourse and discursiveboundaries. Particularly hard to classify generically – is he a “Novelist,poet, essayist, economist, philosopher, [or] mystic?” – Bataille is typi-cally left out of “the literary manuals” of work-centered critics (157).

Barthes asserts, further, that the text is “plural. Which is not simplyto say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the veryplural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plu-ral” (159). This plurality always involves an interaction of reader withauthor and of texts with other texts, a condition of “intertextuality”whose dynamics also challenge assumptions about what is intrinsic orextrinsic to the literary “object,” and which Kristeva first adumbratedin a 1966 presentation on the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whileshe was a student in Barthes’s seminar.24

Barthes’s emphasis on the text’s “plurality” follows from the crucialproposal, also central to Kristeva’s approach to language and meaning,that the text engages signification differently than does the work: “Thework closes on a signified. [ . . . ] The Text, on the contrary, practicesthe infinite deferment of the signified [ . . . ]; its field is that of the sig-nifier” (158). This idea of signification as a series of relations among


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signifiers, of the text as “a playing; the generation of the perpetualsignifier,” is a prominent feature of the French theoretical context inwhich both Barthes and Kristeva elaborate their approach to literature(158). It draws from, but extends, Saussure’s semiological formulationof the sign as a relation between a signifier and a signified, seeing in hismodel – as Kristeva suggests – “heretofore unrecognized possibilitiesof envisioning language as a free play, forever without closure.”25 Andjust as Saussure’s theory informs Jacques Lacan’s description of theunconscious as an endless “signifying chain” of metonymic associa-tions in which signifiers refer to other signifiers, so does it offer a visionof literary or textual signification in which referential meaning ispotentially “infinite” (158).26

Barthes suggests that a text so conceived necessarily changes thekind of interpretative operations one could perform upon it. For if sig-nifiers in a text do not refer to a single, identifiable signified, then theprocess of determining “the meaning” of that text becomes equallyopen-ended. The work offers itself as an object that “falls under thescope of an interpretation, of a hermeneutics.” But the text – becauseit is “metonymic; the activity of associations, contiguities” – demandsan analysis that proceeds “according to a serial movement of discon-nections, overlappings, variations” (158). One could look to S/Z,Barthes’s book-length essay on Balzac’s Sarrasine, as a particularlydazzling demonstration of the analytic activity he calls for here.Richard Howard, in the preface to the English edition, calls S/Z “themost sustained yet pulverized meditation on reading I know in all ofWestern critical literature.”27

By defining Barthes’s project as reading, Howard in fact highlightsanother way Barthes insists that the work/text distinction implicatescritical discourse itself. He himself does so by pointing to the sense inwhich reading a text is a form of “playing,” or indeed “writing,” in itsown right. In “How Does One Speak to Literature?” Kristeva everywherestresses the importance of Barthes’s definition of “writing” – primarilyin his Writing Degree Zero – when she observes that his critical work is“in a way already a writing, a text” (94). In “From Work to Text,” heaffirms that recent experiments in music demand a new creativeagency on the part of the listener that one could call “writing” (163). Hesimilarly asserts such a shift in “The Death of the Author,” concludingthat “the true place of writing [ . . . ] is reading” (147). And in a sectionof S/Z entitled “Interpretation,” he envisions a “writerly text” that “isourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world” (5; emphasis


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Barthes’s). So the shift from work to text corresponds to a shift from“reading” to “writing,” a process we may still call interpretation, but ina self-consciously specific sense. The dynamic, plural definition of thetext – “a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds” – extends toan analogously dynamic definition of textual analysis:

To interpret a text is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or lessfree) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate the plural that consti-tutes it. [ . . . W]e gain access to it by several entrances, none of whichcan be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes that mobi-lize it extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable (mean-ing here is never subject to a principle of determination, unless bythrowing dice); the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plu-ral text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity oflanguage. (5–6; emphasis Barthes’s)

Barthes carefully adds that such a vision of interpretation does not giveus license to make the text mean anything we want it to mean; it doesnot usher in the unbounded critical “relativism” of which theory is oftenaccused. Rather, “the interpretation demanded by a specific text” callsfor something more like humility and rigor, an obligation to rememberthat “[t]o read, in fact, is a labor of language” (4, 11). In other words,reading means recognizing that both the interpretive process and the“literary” process are produced by the same material – language. “FromWork to Text” concludes that the “theory of the Text can coincide onlywith a practice of writing” (164). Though Barthes’s syntax is perhapsambiguous enough to reference the ideological, intellectual, and his-torical “coincide[nces]” with which his essay begins, the discursiveoverlap resonates as well. Both theoretical and literary discourse, in thissense, are “writing” – not identical, but similarly implicated in thedynamics of language and the production of meaning.

From application to implication

This insight helps illuminate each of the three features I argue distin-guish Kristeva’s own intervention upon literary analysis, for it joins arethinking of critical discourse with a rethinking of its object of study.Even more so, it underscores an imperative that extends as much tothe task of “using” Kristeva’s work as it does to her own endeavors. Infact, it renders that task unworkable and puts in its place another.Throughout “From Work to Text,” calling for a newly interdisciplinary


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method of textual analysis and a new conception of the text confoundsassumptions about what borders mark the “inside” and “outside” ofeach. It is easy to cite Barthes’s and (even more) Kristeva’s stylistic idio-syncrasies – the “literary” qualities of their theoretical writings – asmerely clever performances of this insight. Defending Barthes againstthe possible charge that the “writerly” aspect of his essays betrays an“admission of weak theoretical discourse,” Kristeva deems it instead “amethodological exigency of the most serious kind” (“How Does OneSpeak to Literature?” p. 95). For, importantly, Barthes makes clear thatnot only do both our mode of inquiry and that about which we inquireradically change when we shift “from work to text,” so does the veryrelation between them. Part of this claim follows from the dynamic def-inition of textuality itself. If we take seriously its implications, we mustrecognize that critical discourse is itself a “text.” As “literature”becomes “text,” so does “theory” itself. As Barthes suggests, a textualtheory genuinely attentive to language must recognize that it is itselfmade up of language. And a new objective of textual analysis is anawareness of what one’s own critical procedures involve.

The practice of merely applying theory to literature becomes unten-able in the face of such a shift from work to text, from reading to writ-ing. Kristeva suggests that Barthes forces us to regard the relationshipbetween theory and literature as one not of application, but of impli-cation, “their interrelationship implicating both the ‘literary’ personand the quibbling ‘scientific’ specialist, thus setting the stakes wherethe subject is” (94). The co-implication of criticism and the very thingit studies begins with the linguistic “sciences” and remains the burdenof any theory similarly devoted to studying the dynamics of languageand signification, literary or otherwise. With that recognition, itbecomes impossible to presume, responsibly, that critical discoursecould remain in a masterful relation to that which it examines, thatcriticism could be a meta-discourse upon other kinds of texts. In“From Work to Text,” Barthes reflects on a critical horizon that throwsinto doubt the idea of an absolutely authoritative analytic discourse:

a Theory of the Text cannot be satisfied by a metalinguistic exposition:the destruction of meta-language, or at least (since it may be necessaryprovisionally to resort to meta-language) its calling into doubt, is part ofthe theory itself: the discourse on the Text should itself be nothing otherthan text, research, textual activity, since the Text is that social spacewhich leaves no language safe, outside, nor any subject of the enuncia-tion in position as judge, master, analyst, confessor, decoder. (164)


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Kristeva credits Barthes with establishing a literary criticism attentiveto this dynamic interrelationship and highlights the new aims heestablishes for literary criticism: “The objective of this search is tomake manifest the very procedure through which this ‘science,’ its‘object,’ and their relationship are brought about, rather than to applyempirically such and such a technique to an indifferent object” (“HowDoes One Speak to Literature?” p. 95; emphasis Kristeva’s). Not only isthe theoretical claim to authority radically qualified in this descriptionof textual criticism, but so also are the parameters of what criticismmay claim to discover. The aim is no longer to uncover “the meaning”of a text, as hermeneutic models of interpretation set out to do, butrather to find the workings of a poetics (“to make manifest the veryprocedure”) that includes at once the object of study, the instrumentsof study, and the interaction between them.28

Kristeva strongly attests to the importance of Barthes, the “precursorand founder of modern literary studies,” for her own work, and subse-quent chapters of this book will explore just how these methodologicalpremises and definitions inform her specific investigations of litera-ture. More broadly speaking, the theoretical context in which he andshe established many of these ideas have influenced contemporary lit-erary theory in ways, of course, that both overlap their efforts and drawfrom other influences. While linguistics serves as an undeniably cen-tral foundation for challenging prevailing models of literary criticismin the 1960s, 1970s, and beyond, so has psychoanalysis. Indeed, herdeep grounding in psychoanalytic theory shapes Kristeva’s under-standing of textual analysis just as much as linguistics does, in ways wewill explore in the next chapter.

In concluding here, it might be instructive to see how similarlyanother theorist presents the relationship between literature and psy-choanalyis. Shoshana Felman’s eloquent call for a shift from theoreti-cal application to discursive implication highlights just what is at stakein reconceiving this discursive encounter. In her introduction toLiterature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise(1977), she describes the collection of critical essays that follow in away that aptly defines what we might call Julia Kristeva’s “literary the-ory.” Reminding us that “implication” means, etymologically, “beingfolded within,” Felman writes that the encounter between psychoana-lytic and literary discourse is interdisciplinary in itself:

The notion of application would be replaced by the radically differentnotion of implication: [ . . . ] the interpreter’s role would here be, not to


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apply to the text an acquired science, a preconceived knowledge, but toact as a go-between, to generate implications between literature andpsychoanalysis – to explore, bring to light and articulate the various(indirect) ways in which the two domains do indeed implicate eachother, each one finding itself enlightened, informed, but also affected,displaced, by the other.29

As this book will suggest, Kristeva’s theoretical engagements with liter-ature operate from precisely this imperative. Just as she seeksinstances in which signification at once establishes and undoes itself,so does she pursue such upheavals, such displacements at the marginsand intersections of analytic discourse, as well. Such an endeavor per-haps succeeds most when it is risky, precarious – Kristeva’s most influ-ential propositions are also her most contested – but it makes a similardemand on readers who would draw upon her work in their own tex-tual analysis. Bringing Kristeva’s theory to our own task of reading lit-erature requires a commitment to “reading” that involves all of theelements she argues come into play in her own analyses. The conceptof application does not apply, and it cannot, properly, be otherwise. Weare implicated as well.


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2 1 0

I n d e x

Abjection, xi, 4, 20, 150, 151–2, 162–3,174n.7, 185–6, 192, 196, 199

Céline and, 47, 50–8, 64–6, 68, 70, 73,76–9, 85–7

definition of, 30–41, 162–3Joyce and, 91, 113–14, 121–2, 125Wordsworth and, 137, 141, 144–7

Aeschylus, 32, 187agape see loveAlthusser, Louis, 186, 198apotropaia, 80Aquinas, Thomas, 109Aristotle, 122, 197Arnold, Matthew, 39Artaud, Antonin, 40, 53, 98, 99, 107, 111,

113, 195Attridge, Derek, 179n.30Attridge, Derek and Daniel Ferrer (eds.),

Post-structuralist Joyce, 177n.10, 188Aubert, Jacques, 188Augustine of Hippo, 187

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13, 23, 53, 57, 67,92–103, 108, 135, 153, 155–6,177n.13, 184, 186, 188, 190, 191

The Dialogic Imagination, 160, 189Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 100,

189Rabelais and His World, 153

Balzac, Honoré de, 98, 132Sarrasine, 14, 191

Barthes, Roland, 6, 10–18, 23, 48, 57,90–1, 93–9, 105–6, 109, 115–16,155–6, 169n.21, 170n.22, n.23, n.26,n.28, 176n.1, 186, 193

“The Death of the Author,” 14, 94–5,109, 132–3, 170n.22, 189–90

“From Work to Text,” 11–17, 90, 93–4,155, 176n.1, 189–90

The Pleasure of the Text, 158, 190

S/Z, 14, 188, 190Writing Degree Zero, 14, 190

Bataille, Georges, 13, 98, 99, 101, 106,107, 151, 187

Baudelaire, Charles, 137, 187Beardsley, Monroe C. and

W. K. Wimsatt, 11–12, 169n.20Beauvoir, Simone de, 186, 198Beckett, Samuel, 112–13, 132–4,

175n.19Benjamin, Andrew and John Fletcher,

(eds.), Abjection, Melancholia andLove: The Works of Julia Kristeva,192, 196

Benstock, Bernard, 119Benveniste, Emile, 6–7, 23, 186, 192–3Bible, the, 176n.1, 187Blanchot, Maurice, 133–4Bloom, Harold, 169n.20, 188Bloom, Harold and Paul de Man,

Jacques Derrida, GeoffreyHartman, and J. Hillis Miller,Deconstruction and Criticism,136–7

Booth, Wayne, 49Brik, Osip, 160Burgin, Victor, 192Burke, Kenneth, 138, 169n.20Butler, Judith, 199

Camus, Albert, 187, 191carnival/carnivalesque, 53, 66–7, 101–3,

111, 153–4, 159, 186castration, 26, 80catharsis, 40, 65, 102, 125Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, xi–xii, 20, 32,

38, 40–1, 45–89, 90, 96, 97, 106,108–9, 111, 113, 126, 133, 135, 137,154, 160, 174n.7, 182n.12, 184, 186,191, 196–7, 201

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Céline – continuedCastle to Castle, 62–3Conversations with Professor Y, 88, 201Death on the Installment Plan, 48, 54Journey to the End of the Night, 32, 45,

48–9, 54, 58–77, 81, 83–8,175n.15, 201

“Louis-Ferdinand Céline vous parle,” 55

Cervantes, Miguel de, 154Chase, Cynthia, 146–9, 182n.12, 192, 196Chomsky, Noam, 168n.10chora, 28, 117, 154, 163, 186, 195Cixous, Hélène, 186, 198cogito see DescartesColeridge, Samuel Taylor, 137, 198colloquialism, 47, 51, 56Culler, Jonathan, 192

Literary Theory: A Very ShortIntroduction, 4, 171n.7, 172n.10

The Pursuit of Signs, 178n.21, 193–4Structuralist Poetics, 179n.28, 193, 198

Dante Aligieri, 64, 70, 82, 99deconstruction, 136–8, 146, 171n.6, 200De la Sale, Antoine, 98, 159–60De Lauretis, Teresa, 175n.16Deleuze, Gilles, 172n.9Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 9–10De Man, Paul, 136–49, 177n.9, 174n.2,

182n.12The Resistance to Theory, 167n.4“Wordsworth and the Victorians,”

136, 143delirium, 48–50, 96Derrida, Jacques, 21, 22, 90, 136–7, 144

Deconstruction and Criticism, 136–7“Deux mots pour Joyce,” 119Dissemination, 194, 198Of Grammatology, 6“Plato’s Pharmacy,” 45, 85

Descartes, René, 24–5, 35;Cartesian subject, 29, 172n.7cogito, 164, 172n.8Meditations, 35, 166

dialogic/dialogism, 67, 93, 130–1, 153,155–6, 160

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 40, 67, 98, 99, 102,113, 153

Duras, Marguerite, 184

Eichenbaum, Boris, 160Eliot, T. S., 192ellipsis, 161; see also syntax, in

CélineEllmann, Maud, 179n.27, 192epic, 70, 74, 159, 189Eros see love

Felman, Shoshana, 17–18ffrench, Patrick, 177n.14, 195Fielding, Henry, 67, 99; see also picaroFish, Stanley, 169n.20, 193Flaubert, Gustave, 109, 179n.25Fonágy, Ivan, 56, 59formalism, 6–10, 52, 64, 66, 101,

168n.12, 178n.20, 198, 199Foucault, Michel, 6, 21, 22, 90, 132–4Frankenstein, 33Frege, Gottlob, 166, 195Freud, Sigmund, 6, 7, 12, 19–27, 40, 64,

77, 108, 116–17, 138, 141–2, 151,154, 157, 164, 168n.10, 172n.7,173n.14, 180n.43, 187, 195, 199

Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 78Civilization and Its Discontents, 25–6,

31, 38The Interpretation of Dreams, 24,

123–6“Medusa’s Head,” 80, 141, 175 n.26

Genette, Gérard, 61, 188Graham, Allen, 188Graves, Robert, 53, 71, 174n.5, 175n.15Guberman, Ross Mitchell, 3, 20–1, 30

Habermas, Jürgen, 198Hartman, Geoffrey, 136–7Heath, Stephen, 177n.10Hegel, G. W. F., 7, 23, 40, 195, 198Heidegger, 200Hertz, Neil, 138–49Hill, Leslie, 170n.23, 181n.45, 192Hjelmslev, Louis, 166horror see abjectionHusserl, Edmund, 23, 57, 107–8, 166;

see also thetichyperbaton, 64–5, 108; see also

Longinushysteron proteron, 108; see also

transposition

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identification see loveInternational James Joyce Symposium,

90, 119–20, 153intertextuality, 13, 90–8, 107–11, 115–20,

129–34, 150, 155–6, 176n.9, 184,186, 188, 193–4; see alsotransposition

Irigaray, Luce, 198

Jakobson, Roman, 155James, Henry, 100Jardine, Alice, 199jouissance, 49, 91, 113, 152, 156–8, 163,

190–1Joyce, James, xi, xii, 90–131, 133, 135,

152–3, 154, 161, 163Finnegans Wake, 93, 100, 105–6,

109–10, 112–18, 156, 177–8n.18,178n.24, 180n.33

A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan, 109–179n.25

Ulysses, xii, 110, 112, 113–14, 120–1,127–8, 130–1, 151, 153, 188

see also portmanteau language

Kafka, Franz, 40, 98, 101–3, 113, 154Kant, Immanuel, 38, 40, 138Kaplan, Alice Yaeger, 196–7Kofman, Sarah, 172n.9Kristeva, Julia

About Chinese Women, 157, 183, 185“L’Abjet d’amour,” 138, 181n.8“The Adolescent Novel,” 192Black Sun: Depression and

Melancholia, 23, 30, 80, 97, 122,183–5, 199

“The Bounded Text,” 98, 155Desire in Language, 111, 112, 184–5“The Ethics of Linguistics,” 8, 162“The Father, Love, and Banishment,”

112–16, 126“From One Identity to Another,” 8,

111, 184“From Symbol to Sign,” 159–60“How Does One Speak to Literature?,”

8, 10–14, 105, 184“Joyce the ‘Gracehoper,’ or Orpheus’

Return,” 119–21, 126–32Julia Kristeva Interviews, 156, 158, 184The Kristeva Reader, 185; see also Moi

New Maladies of the Soul, 119,120, 185

“A New Type of Intellectual: theDissident,” 112, 185

“The Novel as Polylogue,” 114, 184“Place Names,” 28The Portable Kristeva, 185; see also

Oliver, KellyPowers of Horror: An Essay on

Abjection, 20, 23, 30–41, 45–8, 52,55–69, 70, 73, 81–6, 89, 97, 113–6,122, 125, 127, 130, 137, 138,151–2, 154, 157, 160, 183, 185–6,191, 196, 199

Polylogue, 111, 115, 163, 184“Psychoanalysis and the Polis,”

49–50, 96, 157, 175n.20Revolution in Poetic Language, 3, 6–9,

26–8, 57, 90, 103, 107–11, 125,151, 154, 155–6, 160, 162–3, 166,185, 193

The Samurai, 177n.14, 186Séméiotiké, 8, 9, 98, 104, 108, 111,

169n.14, 183, 184, 193, 200“Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or

a Critique of Science,” 8, 98, 104,169n.14

“Stabat Mater,” 28, 157, 185Strangers to Ourselves, 99, 185, 187“The Subject in Process,” 28, 195“The System and the Speaking

Subject,” 8, 161, 185Tales of Love, 23, 30, 31, 77, 97, 99,

121–6, 129, 138, 147, 152–3, 157,163, 181n.8, 183, 185, 187, 199

Le Texte du roman, 159, 185Time and Sense, 90, 121, 187–8“Towards a Theory of Paragrams,”

178n.21, 195“The True-Real,” 81–2, 157“Within the Microcosm of the

‘Talking Cure’ ,” 28–9“Women’s Time,” 114, 116–19, 185“Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” 93, 98,

100–5, 153–5, 158, 160, 184

Lacan, Jacques, 6, 14, 19–29, 31–3, 35,77, 91, 99, 124, 142, 144, 163–4, 166,168n.6, 170n.26, 173n.17, n.21,182n.8, 186, 197–200

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Lacan – continued“The Agency of the Letter in the

Unconscious or Reason AfterFreud,” 24

“Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis,”173n.15

“The Freudian Thing,” 171n.2“Joyce the Symbol,” 119–20“The Mirror Stage,” 24, 26–7Seminar VII: The Ethics of

Psychoanalysis, 38Seminar XX: “God and the Jouissance

of Woman: A Love Letter,” 156–7Lautréamont, Comte de, 40, 53, 98, 105,

107, 110, 154, 155–6, 163Lechte, John, 3, 5, 150, 197Leitch, Vincent, 169n.20, 197–8Lernout, Geert, 118, 127Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 109Lewis, Philip, 168n.6, 169n.21linguistics, 6–10, 12, 17 , 19, 21, 57, 93,

142, 161, 168n.9, 168n.12, 192, 194,197, 200–1; see also Saussure

Longinus, 64–5, 122–3, 138, 196, 197;see also hyperbaton, sublime/sublimity

Love, 121–9, 144–53, 173n.14, 183n.43,n.44, 187

agape/eros, 121, 129, 152–3identification, 121, 123–9maternal/infant, 144–9transference, 123–6, 129–30,

180n.43, 187

Macciochi, Maria-Antonietta, 118–19Mallarmé, Stéphane, 53, 90, 98, 99, 105,

107, 110, 111, 113, 131, 155–6, 163,179n.28, 186, 194

Manheim, Ralph, 74–5Marshall, Donald, 137Marx, Karl, 7, 12, 23, 40, 57,

168n.9, 172n.7melancholia, 122, 147Menippus of Gadara, 100–1, 158Menippean discourse, 100–5, 135,

153, 158metaphor, 121, 124–5, 129, 188Meltzer, Françoise, 171n.7metalepsis, 79–80metathesis, 108, 179n.28

metonymy, 76–7, 79mimesis, 34–5, 37, 105Miller, J. Hillis, 136–7Minow-Pinkney, Mikiko, 192mirror stage, 31–3, 126, 144, 182n.8;

see also Jacques LacanMoi, Toril, 3, 5, 150, 154, 172n.7, 185,

198–9

narcissism, 31–2, 129, 141–9, 163,180n.43, 187, 196

Narcissus, 31–3, 147–9, 152narrative, 46–8, 53–4, 61, 66–73, 84–5,

111, 128–30and death, 66–72, 82and ellipsis (Genette), 61and violence, 73, 77–83

Nerval, Gérard de, 156, 184New Criticism, the, 8–12, 52, 168n.12,

169n.20, 197–8Nietzsche, Friedrich, 40, 127, 172n.7,

n.9, 183, 200Norris, Margot, 179n.32

O’Brien, Tim, 75, 77–85, 111Oedipus, 32, 38, 151Oedipal structure, 26, 141–3; see also

pre-OedipalOliver, Kelly, 3, 28, 173n.21, 185, 199onomatopoeia, 63, 174n.11Ovid, 182n.12; see also NarcissusOwen, Wilfred, 175n.15

Paine, Thomas, 187paronomasia, 108Pater, Walter, 98Payne, Michael, 151, 166, 168n.11,

199–200Peirce, Charles Sanders, 6, 159Perelman, Bob, 89Peter, Paul and Mary, 79–83, 111;

see also O’Brienpharmakon, 85, 194; see also Derridapicaresque, 54, 67–8, 71–2, 86–9Picaro

Ferdinand Bardamu (Céline),67–9, 72

Barry Lyndon (Thackeray), 67Tom Jones (Fielding), 67Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 67–8

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Plato, 64, 85, 111, 122, 129, 154, 187, 194plot, xi, 46, 51, 67–8, 71, 96Plotinus, 192Poe, Edgar Allan, 100, 137poetic language, 9–10, 55, 102–3, 109,

135, 160–1, 164, 169n.14, 195, 198portmaneau language, 106–7, 109–10,

128, 153; see also James Joycepoststructuralism, 21–5, 124, 133,

135–7, 141–2, 164, 172n.12,174n.3, 177n.10, n.14, 193,197, 198–9

pre-Oedipal, 26–7, 112, 114–5, 125,140–7, 150, 196

primary narcissism see narcissismPrinceton Encyclopedia of Poetry and

Poetics, 80Proust, Marcel, 40, 53, 90, 98, 102–3,

113, 188

Quintilian, 79

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 120Rabelais, François, 53, 67, 98, 100, 101,

102, 106, 154, 186Racine, Jean, 191Ransom, John Crowe, 168n.12reading, rhetorical vs. thematic, 4–6,

16–18, 46–7, 50–2, 114, 130, 141,167n.4, 170n.28, 174n.2,181n.45, 192

rhetoric, of violence vs. violence ofrhetoric, 73–84

rhythm, 47, 56–7, 63, 65, 113–14, 127,162; see also style, syntax

Riffaterre, Michael, 188, 193Rimbaud, Arthur, 173n.15Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 195Roudiez, Léon, 3, 6–7, 160Romanticism, 135–8, 146–9Rose, Jacqueline, 199Rosenberg, Isaac, 175n.15Russian formalism see formalism

Sade, Marquis de, 99, 154Sappho, 122–3Sartre, Jean-Paul, 172n.8Sassoon, Siegfried, 71, 175n.15Saussure, Ferdinand de, 6, 14, 21, 24, 34,

103, 110, 142, 159, 161, 170n.26,

172n.10, 178n.21, 181n.8, 192–3,195, 200–1; see also linguistics

Scott, Clive, 56Shakespeare, William, 99, 101, 121,

127–31semanalysis, 150, 161–2semiotic/symbolic, 102, 125, 150, 152,

162–3, 173n.19, 199Semmelweis, Philip, 196signifiance, 9, 150, 158, 163–4, 186,

190–1Sollers, Philippe, 99, 100, 116–19, 121,

127–8, 161, 170n.28, 177n.10,177–8n.18, 180n.33, 186, 188,193–4, 199

sublimation, 37–40, 114, 171n.5sublime/sublimity, 37–40, 54–5, 64–5,

122, 138–42, 147, 192; see also Kant,Longinus

Sterne, Laurence, 67–8; see also picaroSwift, Jonathan, 98–100, 101, 101–2,

153, 154Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 131symbol/sign, 159, 165style, xi, 35–40, 46–7, 54–68, 75–6, 79,

88–9, 108, 115, 191–2, 196and narrative, 66–8, 75–6and violence, 61, 63–4, 68, 79, 88–9;

see also rhetoric; syntaxsyntax, 51, 56–66, 108, 115, 165

in Céline, 46–7, 54–68ellipsis, 41, 51, 56–7, 61–8and spoken language, 55–9preposement/postponement, 57–8,

61, 64, 127sentence segmentation, 56–7theme/rheme bipartition, 56, 59, 62see also abjection

Tel Quel, 91, 98, 99, 116, 177n.14, 183Tel Quel, 118, 177n.10, 180n.33, 184, 194Thackeray, William, 67, 99; see also picarothetic, 107, 165–6; see also HusserlThiher, Allen, 49Topia, André, 188transference see lovetransposition, 107–10, 129, 155; see also

intertextualitytransubstantiation, 121, 127–9, 175n.19trauma, 77–8, 81–3

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uncanny, the, 33, 126, 136, 149, 187

Varro, Marcus Terentius, 101violence see narrative; rhetoricVirgil, 74Voltaire, 101Volosinov, V. N., 178n.19; see also

Bakhtin

Waller, Margaret, 3, 92–5, 105, 108, 130,174n.6

Weber, Samuel, 36–7, 172n.10, n.11,173n.16

Weiskel, Thomas, 141Wilde, Oscar, 99, 131Woolf, Virginia, 188, 192Wordsworth, William, xii, 135–49

“Immortality Ode,” 148The Prelude, 138–48; “Blessed

Babe” (Book II), 144–7; “BlindBeggar” (Book VII), 138–40,142, 148

“Tintern Abbey,” 145World War I, 58, 68–71, 78, 81

Zola, Émile, 191

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