riffaterre 1980 syllepsis critical inquiry 6.pdf

Riffaterre, Michael, Syllepsis , Critical Inquiry, 6:4 (1980:Summer) p.625

Syllepsis

Michael Riffaterre

Intertextuality inheres in the two fundamental and defining features of the literary text: it makes the text what it is, a semiotic and a formal unit. In a nutshell, the very idea of textuality is inseparable from and founded upon intertextuality.l

Intertextuality is a modality of perception, the deciphering of the text by the reader in such a way that he identifies the structures to which the text owes its quality of work of art. Like all structures, these are actualized in the form of variants. Such variants in a text must necessarily be verbal shapes, that is, words considered at one or more of three levels: phonetic, lexical, and syntactic. These words which serve to actualize structures are not intrinsically different from other words. Rather, they are now perceived within a particular grammatical sequence and from a different viewpoint; hence they mean differently. This difference is what separates meaning from significance. Or put it this way: I propose to describe how a literary text yields sense by distinguishing two semantic systems for any verbal sequence forming such a text-meaning and significance. I shall speak of meaning when words signify through their one-to-one relationship with nonverbal referents, that is, their reference to what we know or believe we know as reality. I shall speak of significance when these same words signify through their relationship

1. On intertextuality, see Julia Kristeva's Semeiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris, 1969), esp. p. 255; Poetique 27 (1976), special issue devoted to intertextuality; Laurent Jenny's "Semiotique du collage intertextuel," Revue d'esthetique 3-4 (1978): 165-82; and my Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington, Ind., 1978), pp. 115-50.

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626 Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis

with structural invariants (no one-to-one relationship this time since there must be two or more variants for one invariant).2

Now variants can be recognized as such only by means of comparison: when it comes home to us that several statements are indeed connected, despite their differences, through their identical relationship with another statement, we realize that they are, so to speak, reformulations or translations into different codes of an archetypal message. There are two possible (by no means mutually exclusive) ways of reading comparatively, reading so that comparison forces itself upon the reader's attention: retroactive reading and intertextual reading.

Retroactive reading occurs at every step of normal (from page top to bottom) reading, growing more important as more textual space is covered. Working forward from beginning to end, the reader keeps reviewing and comparing backward, recognizing repetitions, recognizing that some segments of the text are variations upon a semantic sameness and therefore variants upon the same structure(s).3 Intertextual reading is the perception of similar comparabilities from text to text; or it is the assumption that such comparing must be done even if there is no intertext at hand wherein to find comparabilities. In the latter case, the text holds clues (such as formal and semantic gaps) to a complementary intertext lying in wait somewhere.

We must be careful to avoid the confusion between intertextuality and intertext that spoils most of the studies newly born of the current craze for intertextuality. The intertext proper is the corpus of texts the reader may legitimately connect with the one before his eyes, that is, the texts brought to mind by what he is reading. This corpus has loose and flexible limits. Theoretically it can go on developing forever, in accordance with the reader's cultural level; it will expand as his readings expand and as more texts are published that can be linked up to the original point whence these associated memories took their departure. The ability to connect or collocate texts does not, however, result from

2. The distinction I draw between meaning and significance is thus entirely different from E. D. Hirsch's in Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn., 1967), p. 8. As I see it, significance is the product of a second reading stage, and in the bipolar relationship between meaning and significance, meaning appears as the continuously changing pole.

3. On retroactive reading, see my Semiotics of Poetry, pp. 5, g, 165-66.

Michael Riffaterre, Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French Literature and chairman of the department of French and Romance literatures at Columbia University, is the editor of Romanic Review. His most recent books are Semiotics of Poetry and La Production du Texte. "Syllepsis" developed out of seminars he led at the Irvine School of Criticism and Theory and at Johns Hopkins University. His forthcoming books, Typology of Intertextuality and A Grammar of Descriptive Poetry, are scheduled to appear next year.



Critical Inquiry Summer 1980 627

merely superficial similarities of wording or topic; two or more literary passages are collocable and comparable as text and intertext only if they are variants of the same structure. Intertextual connection takes place when the reader's attention is triggered by the clues mentioned above, by intratextual anomalies--<>bscure wordings, phrasings that the context alone will not suffice to explain-in short, ungrammaticalities within the idiolectic norm (though not necessarily ungrammaticalities vis-a-vis the sociolect) which are traces left by the absent intertext, signs of an incompleteness to be completed elsewhere. These, in turn, are enough to set in train an intertextual reading, even if the intertext is not yet known or has been lost with the tradition it reflected.

This kind of zero intertextuality (unfulfilled or unactualized) makes it somewhat paradoxical to speak of comparability where comparison is no longer possible or has been postponed. I shall therefore use presuppositions instead and talk of significance where words signify by presupposing an intertext either potential in language or already actualized in literature. Thus one of the basic components of a text's literariness (along with catachresis, overdetermination, and closure) is that the text is not simply a sequence of words organized as syntagms but a sequence of presuppositions. In literary writing every lexical element is the tip of an iceberg, of a lexical complex whose whole semantic system is compressed within the one word that presupposes it. To put it otherwise: the literary text is a sequence of embeddings with each significant word summarizing the syntagm situated elsewhere. So far as I can make out, there are three types of intertextuality: first, the complementary type (every sign has a reverse and an obverse; the reader is forced to interpret the text as the negative, in the photographic sense, of its intertext); second, the mediated type (where the reference of text to intertext is effected through the intercession of a third text functioning as the interpretant that mediates between sign and object, in Charles S. Peirce's terminology); and third, the intratextual type (where the intertext is partly encoded within the text and conflicts with it because of stylistic or semantic incompatibilities).

These three distinctions should help check the tendency, now all too general, to see intertextuality as nothing more than a newfangled name for source or influence. Influence from text to text, or the linkup of text with source, is a "vertical" relationship of recurrence and sameness, whereas intertext is related to text "laterally": there is a simultaneity and otherness, a contiguity, a mutual solidarity, so that the text functions as a literary artifact only insofar as it complements another text. The text's ungrammaticality is but a sign of a grammaticality elsewhere, its significance a reference to meaning elsewhere. Again, it would be wrong to confuse the intertext with allusion or quotation,4 for the relation

4. On the poetics of quotation, see Antoine Compagnon's La Seconde main; au, Le Travail de la citation (Paris, 1979); see also "Allusion Studies: An International Annotated Bibliography, 1921-1977," compo Carmela Perri, Style 13 (Spring 1979): 178-225.




between these and the text is aleatory-identification depends upon the reader's culture-while the relation of text to presuppositions is obligatory since to perceive these we need only linguistic competence.5

Having posited my basic principles, I now propose to examine more specifically what relationship exists between intertextuality operating as a constraint upon reading (as a set of restrictions upon the reader's freedom, as a guide for him in his interpreting) and ambiguity, or the kind of obscurity that prevents the reader from quite discerning which of a word's pertinent meanings are equally acceptable in context. Ambiguity is generally, if empirically, recognized as a feature typical of literary discourse. As I see it, ambiguity exemplifies the idiolectic ungrammaticalities that warn the reader of a latent intertext. Text and intertext alike derive from these ungrammaticalities.

Ambiguity is not the polysemy most words display as dictionary entries but results from the context's blocking of the reader's choice among competing meanings, as when, to use an example from Derrida, a French context hinders the reader from deciding whether plus de means "lack" (no more) or "excess" (more than).6 In this case, the undecidability is due entirely to the fact that the reader is playing a score, the syntax, that will not let him choose. This must be because the score is badly written; yet it is precisely this sort of willful neglect that critics have labeled poetic licence, thereby underlining its literary nature. Undecidability has become a central feature in Derrida's analyses of literariness, and it is also the main underpinning of his creative writing. 7 Better still, his own critical discourse has put undecidability to use, not a rare case of metalanguage imitating the very devices of the language it purports to analyze. My examples are therefore drawn from Derrida on the assumption that his conscious practice of erriture, backed up by a sophisticated theory, will be particularly illuminating. For my own analysis of these phenomena, I shall be using a special word that Derrida has adopted and adapted from the terminology of ancient rhetoric. He proposes it in his commentary on this sentence of Mallarme's: "La scene n'illustre que l'idee, pas une action effective, dans une hymen ... entre Ie desir et l'accomplissement, la perpetration et son souvenir."8 Our critic

5. Compare Jonathan Culler's criticism of Harold Bloom in "Presupposition and Intertextuality," Modern Language Notes 91 (1976): 138~96.

6. See Jacques Derrida's La Dissemination (Paris, 1972), p. 307. 7. Because Derrida is a philosopher by trade, one would expect his undecidability to

reflect the very precise logical and mathematical concepts of that discipline--which is to say, the limitations inherent in the axiomatic method. Kristeva, for example, tries to do this in her Le Texte du roman: Approche semiologique d'une structure discursive tran!!formationnelle (The Hague, 1970), pp. 7&-78. So far as I can make out, however (as a layman I have hardly been able to go beyond the relatively simplified but highly instructive exposition of the problem in Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman's Codel's Proof [New York, 1958]), Derrida's critical theory and reading practice do not pack more into the word "undecidable" than does the definition I offer in this paper.

8. Stephane Mallarme, Mimique, Oeuvres completes (Paris, 1951), p. 310: "the scene [a drama, or rather a pantomime] bodies forth only an idea, not an action: it is like a hymen




points out that the grammar prevents the reader from choosing between hymen as "marriage," a symbolic union or fusion, and as "vaginal membrane," the barrier to be broken through if desire is to reach what it desires. Undecidability is the effective mechanism of pantomime as an art form since from mimicry alone, without words, the spectator cannot tell whether a dreamed, or a remembered, or a present act is being set forth. This, in turn, Derrida shows to be fundamental to Mallarme's concept of poetry. It is simply a pun or, as Derrida prefers to call it, a "syllepsis,"9 the trope that consists in understanding the same word in two different ways at the same time, one meaning being literal or primary, the other figurative. 10 The second meaning is not just different from and incompatible with the first: it is tied to the first as its polar opposite or the way the reverse of a coin is bound to its obverse-the hymen as unbroken membrane and as a breaking through of the barrier. The fact that hymen is also metaphorical in both its meanings is irrelevant to its undecidability. What makes it undecidable is not that it is an image but that it embodies a structure, that is, the syllepsis.

To the three types of intertextuality I have listed above there correspond three different roles played by the syllepsis. With the complementary type, the syllepsis itself suffices to presuppose the intertext and by itself conveys the significance. With the mediated type, the syllepsis refers to the textual interpretant. With the intratextual type, the syllepsis symbolizes the compatibility, at the significance level, between a text and an intertext incompatible at the level of meaning.

The complementary type .-Mallarme's hymen illustrates syllepsis generating this type of intertextuality. It is rare, however, to find two normal, current meanings of the same word activated simultaneously. 11

Yet a word may have only one meaning and still be turned into a syllepsis. For that to happen it suffices if the context's lexicon has semantic features opposable to the semantic features of the word. For instance, Derrida's own metalanguage builds upon undecidability a commentary on the wellspring image in Paul Valery's poetry-not the picturesque wellspring, the natural forest fountain that is no more than a synecdoche for the traditional locus amoenus; this spring is a metaphor for the origin of a work of art, for an opposition between the poet's "I" and the "not I," the universe he is describing. Whereas that universe exists for the I, starts

between desire and its realization, or between an act committed and the memory of it"; here and elsewhere, my translation unless otherwise cited. Derrida's commentary, "La Double seance," has been rpt. in La Dissemination, pp. 199-317; see esp. pp. 240 ff.

9. See La Dissemination, p. 249. 10. This definition has prevailed ever since Dumarsais' treatise, Des Tropes (Paris,

1730). That syllepsis must be distinguished from the so-called grammatical syllepsis or the zeugma is apparent in Heinrich Lausberg's Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (Munich, 1960), pars. 702-7; on the acceptation chosen by Derrida, see pars. 7-8.

11. See La Dissemination, p. 310 n.63.



630 Michael RifJaterre Syllepsis

existing when the poet gives it expression, "the I, the exception to and the condition of everything that appears, does not appear itself."12 Source must therefore be defined as the borderline between water and "no water." Instead of using this awkward negative compound, Derrida pretends to find a syllepsis in an existing (perfectly unequivocal) word which he transforms into an undecidable word: "Ie mot source: origine d'un cours d'eau, de-part et point-d'eau, locutions qui sont tout pres de virer, de fa~on nullement fortuite, vers les figures de la secheresse, du negatif et de la separation."13 Phrases about to veer away, literally: on the verge of turning about or changing color. And that does indeed define, or rather create, undecidability, and it does indeed produce a kind of figurative code (in the sense of figurative versus abstract art). The negativization of the French word source is not to be confused with pejoration. Pejoration would yield a dried-up well or a brackish spring-or perhaps a snake in the fountain. Here we have only a glimpse of truth through the complementary negative of what has been stated-the translation of philosophical discourse into the language of echoing connotation: into poetic discourse.

Which leads me to a narrower scrutiny of what Derridajoyously says about his own pun: this pun is by no means fortuitous. This puzzled me at first because I was doing a linear reading, that is, I was assuming that Derrida read point d' eau as a lexeme with two reversible or interchangeable sememes, an obverse "spring" and its reverse, "no water." This would be a sort of semantic coupling-now you see it, now you don'twhich I knew full well had to be his decision to fool or seduce the reader by punning on point ("point") and point ("no"). He could not possibly think that point, within a water context or within a compound word, could turn into a negative. 14 But the reader stops puzzling and can only marvel with Derrida at the resources of language, for his pun is not gratuitous. It makes explicit a presupposition of point d'eau; it actualizes the word's natural intertext because point d'eau in its "spring of water" meaning is actually inseparable from drought qnd accommodates a derivation leading to "no water." Indeed, the French point d'eau does not belong to the same descriptive system as the regular word for spring, source. Whereas source may appear in the mimesis of nearly any setting and is surrounded by associations like fresh water, coolness, rushes,

12. Derrida, "Qual quelle," Marges de La philosophie (Paris, 1972), p. 334; cf. p. 339 n.S. 13. Ibid., p. 333: "the word 'wellspring': origin of a watercourse, point of departure

[Derrida separates root and prefix with a hyphen to emphasize the cutoff] and point d'eau [in French point d'eau is literally a spot where water wells up from the ground; but out of context, if we take point as the old-fashioned, emphatic negative adverb, point d' eau can be read as "no water," and this authorizes Derrida, though only just barely, to go on as follows:], these are turns of speech about to veer-and absolutely not by accident-toward images of drought, of negativity, and of separation."

14. Point in point d'eau is a noun and therefore must be preceded by an article; point the negative adverb cannot take the article. Hence the completely different syntagmatic distributions for the two.




reeds, the greenest kind of moss-in short, by positive associations, point d'eau, by contrast, is surrounded by negative images of the desert. Point d'eau, in a paradigm of source near-synonyms, conjures up, like oasis (but without the latter's verdant connotations), arid landscapes, long, dusty, thirsty treks from one rare water hole to another. You cannot say point d' eau without generating a converse waterless context. The word conforms to the model of negative dialectic not because of any polysemy or ambiguity but because it happens to presuppose a contrary intertext.

The mediated type.-Let me return now to Mallarme's hymen and demonstrate how that syllepsis indirectly governs the intertextuality of one of Derrida's own essays, "Tympan." The text of Derrida's essay is derived from the title, the intertext from hymen. 15 Tympan is equated with hymen, or rather both are made variants of the same syllepsis and thus is created the intertextual relationship. The forcing of tympan into a sylleptic structure, although its natural structure rules out the syllepsis, is accomplished by means of a textual interpretant that posits or implies the equation tympan = hymen. 16 Derrida's essay concerns the concept of limitation in philosophy, especially the transgression of limits and, more especially, the relationship between philosophy and its inseparable counterpart, or corollary, nonphilosophy or even antiphilosophy (empirical knowledge, for instance). In French, the (at least primary) meaning of tympan, borrowed from the Greek for "drum," is "eardrum," middle ear. But more precisely and technically, tympan refers to the taut membrane that receives sound vibrations and transmits them to the inner ear. Hence this meaning is the synecdoche of the primary one. The essay is not couched in abstract language but takes the form of a long metaphor derived from the title. And in that title the eardrum stands for boundaries, while sounds are facts and concepts translated into philosophical discourse. These, in turn, are represented by the perceiving and interpreting nervous system of the ear. The text even plays on the word types through the Greek: here the word TV7TO/" related to tympan, may mean "form," "image," or "concept" but also the impression made by a sound. Derrida's aim is to transcend the limits, to deconstruct the hierarchies and distinctions of self-contained philosophical discourse, to make it communicate with other discourses and their intrinsic features, normally filtered, annexed, and reconstructed by philosophy. Translated metaphorically this produces: break through the eardrum and yet somehow maintain the equilibrium between outside and inside pressure enabling it to transmit sound. We recognize at once the undecidability of the hymen image. The final blow, in fact, that bursts the philosophical eardrum is a pun once more-a readily understandable pun but the sort universally greeted with a groan. What makes it tolera-

15. See Den-ida, Marges, pp. i-xxv. 16. I adapt this textual model from Peirce's interpretant. See Umberto Eco's "Peirce

and Contemporary Semantics," Versus 15 (1976): 49-72; and my "Semiotique intertextuelle: L'Interpretant," Revued'esthetique 1-2 (1979): 128-50.



632 Michael RifJaterre Syllepsis

ble nonetheless is a kind ofliterary accolade bestowed upon it: the reader sees it as a reference to a textual interpretant of its own, a Mallarme passage once again. Indeed, the blow is called a coup de donc 17 ("the blow struck by therefore")-so we have a pun stacking one expression on top of the other: first, an auditory metaphor, coup de gong ("gong stroke"); second, the adverb that best summarizes deduction, donc ("therefore") ~onclgong; and third, an oblique allusion to the title of Mallarme's prose poem, 19itur, Latin for donc, which, once translated, slips easily into the mold of Mallarme's use, in another title, of coup de des ("roll of the dice"). 18

The trouble with the eardrum metaphor, however, is what Derrida himself remarks on: the logic of its representation, its logic as mimesis. How can any sound break through the eardrum and still be heard? Logically, philosophy should be deafer. Once the coincidentia oppositorum of the hymen image is inserted into that of tympan ("eardrum"), the solution is provided by a mediating interpretant, the parallel text of excerpts from the poet Michel Leiris' autobiography, BifJures. 19 These form a narrow column running along Derrida's text-a significant margin that conveys meaning, instead of the white barrier of an ordinary margin (another oblique allusion to the opposing functions of hymen). In that text Leiris describes melody, especially the operatic voice, as a steel blade piercing the listener with pleasure-an obvious phallic image that takes on the dual aspects of hymen. And better yet, Leiris uses two images for his dreaming upon the inward convolutions of the ear: a tiny bug, the earwig, commonly called perce-oreille (literally, "ear-piercer"); and Persephone, the Greek Proserpine, goddess of the dead. Leiris rationalizes this name as "piercing" and "phone" ("voice") and speaks of the voice descending, like the goddess herself, into the Underworld, the "deeper subterranean reaches of hearing ... where the caves still echo the faintest murmurs."20 Thus the two complementary features of hymen are transferred to tympan through Leiris' image. If we are to read the "Tympan" text correctly, that is, with a logic not of its metaphor but of what Derrida's reasoning might be if expressed literally, we must interpret it intertextually. Tympan, then, presupposes Mallarme's hymen, or rather Derrida's commentary on it (the intertext), while Leiris' interpretant gives the reader guidance, as it were, mapping out the path that leads

17. Marges, p. xxv. 18. Coup de des, then, is like a further interpretant connecting a "stroke of igitur" and a

"stroke of done." See Mallarme, 19itur; au, La Folie d'Elbehnon, Oeuvres eomplRtes, pp.433-43. Without laboring the point, we can say Igitur's coup de des coincides with the gongish stroke of midnight, and Mallarme comments upon it as if it were a symbol of undecidability: "Minuit sonne--Ie Minuit ou doivent etre jetes les des .... Igitur ... fait Ie geste. Indifference .... L'infini sort du hasard [Midnight strikes-midnight, the moment for rolling dice .... Igitur makes the throw. Indifference. Out of the random flows Infinity)" (p. 434; see also p. 442).

19. See Jeffrey Mehlman's A Structural Study of Autobiography: Proust, Leins, Sartre, Levi-Strauss (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), pp. 149, 113-17, 135-41.

20. Marges, pp. vi-ix.




him from the essay's title back to the syllepsis. The significance of Derrida's essay remains lacunary unless we read it along with Leiris' marginal text. Similarly, coup de done, as a pun on coup de gong, continues to look less than felicitous as long as we do not see that it is "verified," ')ustified"-that is, motivated-by its Mallarmean interpretant.

The intratextual type.-A perfect, if complex, example of this type is Derrida's baffling book Gtas ("Death Knell").21 Glas is an enormously expanded commentary on Hegel that proclaims itself a monument to intertextuality, divided as it is into two texts. The left-hand column on each page is a direct paraphrase of Hegel; the right-hand column is at once a paraphrase of Jean Genet and a spin-off from the Hegel column. I am examining Glas also because the book is offered as a fragment: it begins with the truncated end of a sentence and ends with the unfinished beginning of a sentence. And yet, paradoxically, intertextuality does impose upon this fragment the closure or clausula without which it would be hard to distinguish between text and discourse.

The truncated start of Glas, "quoi du reste aujourd'hui, pour nous, ici, maintenant, d'un Hegel? ... Ces mots sont des citations [anyway--or anyhow-what is Hegel for us here, today? or: What is a Hegel the way we see things here and now? ... These are his words I quote]," alludes to Hegel's criticism of the idea of sense-certainty: Can we acquire absolute knowledge from sensory experience? Hegel begins with an analysis of the meaning of the pronoun "this" (German dies, French (a), which we use to point to what we imagine is reality. Hegel divides it into its semantic components "Here" and "Now" and finds them equally difficult to pin down:

[Let's] take the "This" in the twofold shape of its being, as "Now" and as "Here." ... To the question: "What is Now?" let us answer, e.g. "Now is Night." ... We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down .... If now, this noon, we look again at the written truth, we shall have to say that it has become stale.22

This "Here" and "Now" we recognize in Derrida's beginning and again in his ending of Glas:

Ce que j'avais redoute, naturellement, deja, se reedite. Au.iourd'hui, ici, maintenant, Ie debris de23 [Naturally, what I had

21. Derrida, Glas (Paris, 1974). For commentary on Glas, see Geoffrey Hartman's "Monsieur Texte: On Jacques Derrida, His Glas, " Georgia Review 29 (1975): 759-97; his "Monsieur Texte II: Epiphony in Echoland," Georgia Review 30 (1976): 17(}""94; and Jeffrey Mehlman's Revolution awl Repetition (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 105-7.

22. G. F. W. Hegel,PhenomenologyofSpirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), par. 95, pp.59-60.

23. Glas, p. 291.




-been dreading all along is starting all over again (or, more literally: "is already appearing again." This minor image is borrowed from the language of publishing: "is already in its second printing.") Today, here, now, the fragment left over from]

The book ends the way it started, back at square one of the game. In between, the critique of sense-certainty runs through the parallel glosses on Hegel and Genet. Just before he lets the book trail off into a repeat of the initial sentence, Derrida describes periphrastically what Geoffrey Hartman calls a "laborious phallic erection as just another-yet another-raising up (re-Ieve), equivalent to the re-telling-re-publishing (re-edite) alluded to in the next and last sentence of the book."24 However valid the phallic interpretation may be, I think we must first take it for what it says it is: an erection in the monument or edifice sense-the construction of an Egyptian obelisk:

C'est tres aride, sur l'esplanade immense, mais c;a ne fait que commencer, Ie travail, ici, des maintenant. Des que c;a commence a ecrire. Ca commence a peine. Ne manque plus qu'une piece.

Ca grince. Roule sur les troncs d'arbre couches. Poulies. Les cordes graissees se tendent, on n'entend qu'elles, et Ie souffle des esclaves plies en deux. Bons a tirer. Fouet cinglant du contremaitre. Regain de force liee. La chose est oblique. Elle fait angle, deja, avec Ie sol. Remord lentement son ombre, sure de soi. 25

Which is another way of indicating a return to the beginning of the text since at the outset the matrix Hegel quotation is followed by a discussion of the philosopher's views on religious buildings in the history of architecture. Although the passage is in truth a kind of rebus, its empty center, the key word, left unspoken, must be "obelisk" rather than "phallus," for the entire description plainly evokes an Egyptian scene. First a vast expanse of sand, already landscaped into a monumental plaza ("C'est tres aride, sur l'esplanade"). Then something sliding slowly over a bed of huge, rounded logs, dragged forward by slaves, then raised up toilsomely: What can this object be but a huge stone rolled from a quarry to the space left in front of the temple, where it is to stand as a sacred pillar? The reader can have no hesitation: every detail fits into a stereotyped descriptive system about engineering in ancient Egypt, part

24. Hartman, "Monsieur Texte," p. 791. 25. Glas, p. 291: 'The vast expanse of the plaza is utterly arid, but it is only beginning,

the work, here, right now. As soon as it begins to write. It is hardly beginning. Only one piece [part] is missing.

It is creaking. Rolls along over tree trunks lying side by side. Pulleys. The greased ropes grow taut, all you hear is the noise they make except for the heavy panting of the slaves with their low-bent backs. Good for nothing but dragging loads. The slashing whip of the foreman. The redoubling of harnessed strength. The thing is oblique. Already it is at an angle to the ground. Slowly now it is gnawing into its own shadow, steadily."




of French schoolroom lore, the answer to the classroom query: How on earth could they move such heavy masses without the help of cranes or mechanical power? Of course the reader knows right off that the obelisk stands metaphorically for some meaningful sign {the text speaks not of primitive engineering but of "precapitalist writing": "la machine est encore trop simple, Ie mode d'ecriture capitaliste"}. Nevertheless, every realistic detail familiar to schoolchildren is mentioned here, down to the resonance of the taut ropes vibrating, the slaves panting, the foreman's lash cracking.

This realism functions first to disambiguate the description beyond all doubt; but, revealingly, its culmination as an index of reality is also the point where a new pun undermines the whole archeological tableau so that the description turns out to be nothing but a verbal booby trap. The reader is yanked back from the right-hand column on the last page to the left-hand column on the next to last page-the page facing the last. By the same token, the pun tells him that the phallus is only a first metaphorical level; it then yanks him still further back to the book's first left-hand column three hundred pages upstream. For this pun reveals that the obelisk is actually a meta-metaphor for the retelling, the return to the incipit. And all this happens to the one detail that is really just too much, where Derrida overdoes his archeology: the slaves pictured as mere beasts of burden, good for nothing but shouldering their loads. The text says "bons a tirer." This is pathos-the life of the toiling masses in Pharaoh's land-but it is also a compound technical term of printing and publishing jargon: bons it tirer is press-proof, the galleys in their last stage before the book is actually printed~ Note also that at the very moment he finishes his retelling Derrida is also speaking printers' language: "re-edite" means to publish a second edition. In its technical usage, bons it tirer may be seen as facilitating production of the image, as a kind of Freudian Bahnung through the resistant density of more expectable verbal associations. But as a pun, bons it tirer bridges the gap between the conclusion and the page preceding, which contains the word tirage {"second printing"}-from bons it tirer to tirage. And thus the reader comes retroactively to understand a feature still now nonsensical: in the left-hand column of the page before, stands quoted, quite unaccountably, a long business letter from Hegel to his publisher anent a second printing which, says Hegel, will contain no emendations or additions. In other words, the last two pages, left and right, repeat the same message in architectural (or Egyptian) code and in publishing code, both subdialects of "Hegelian," the language that has now been substituted for French. The message: "I shall be saying the same thing all over again." That is, of course, "I am going to read and meditate anew upon the Hegel sentence I began with."

But in spanning the gulf between left page and right, the pun rounds off the book in another way too. It links the left-hand column, the H.egel column, to the right-hand, the Genet column, through a ver-




bal, lexical bridging like that on the first page of Ctas, where a variation on one verb saturated both columns. The two-columned page becomes a single page once more. The Mallarmean fold is closed, the pti, Mallarme's basic image for the structure of the book-page piled on top of page-an image Derrida likes to play with. 26 Better yet, since here the left- and right-hand columns, punningly connected, are not on the same page but on facing pages, the folding up shuts the book. Again, and still better, take another step: since this fold was first unfolded by the dissemination of the book's first sentence into a Hegel and Genet text and now folds back, the last words at bottom right of the last page, by taking up again the first words at top left of the first page, in effect reduce to naught the whole mass of the book's intervening three hundred pages. They are all just a gloss on that initial sentence. And with exemplary circularity the gloss itself has brought us back full circle to its first example too, since the erection of the obelisk illustrates the folding over, the shutting of the book, because the image resumes the first comments on Hegel, quoting from his Esthetik on India's phallic columns and Egypt's giant statues. In so doing, the obelisk plays, curiously, the same role as Jean Cocteau's image of the factory smokestack repeated at start and finish of his film Le Sang d'un poete. The first shot in the film is of the smokestack beginning to crumble; the last shows its total collapse. Which is to say the whole movie in between, with its long dream sequences and its plot involvements, all really took only a few seconds of objective time; the dreamer's subjective imaginary experience has given it duration. So it is with Clas, the book-length Talmud of a very short Hegelian dictum, inserted by the reader into the narrow slit between the Here and the Now into which Hegel divided This. Or else the whole ofClas equals the "and" co~oining the two instances of This.

It is obvious from the above that the letter to the publisher and the obelisk tableau are non-sense in a linear reading (in which case, tirer would be the trope contrary to the syllepsis, namely, the antanaclasis-repeating the same word but with different meanings). The letter and the tableau make sense only together, in a comparative reading, and there would be nothing to dictate such a reading if it were not for the undecidability of bons a tirer and for ungrammaticalities that corroborate the effect of the syllepsis on the reader and further insure that he will read the two texts together and interpret them as two variants of one invariant. There are such ungrammaticalities. They even provide further objective proof that the obelisk does indeed complement (redite) or reedite the letter and is a metaphor for the return to the book's beginning. First this: that the obelisk, centerpiece of the Egyptian scene, remains unnamed. This disappearing act would be passing strange if the subject of the description were really an exotic tableau. In truth, however, the

26. See La Dissemination, pp. 281-306.




obelisk is merely the figurative substitute for Hegel's r;a, and thus stamps with a final image the circularity of Glas, rolls up the scroll of exegesis upon that pronoun. The text says so: "Ga grince, <;a se penche [This is creaking, this is about to fall]." But actually the clincher must be a curious contradiction in the Egyptian scene: "C;a commence a peine. Ne manque plus qu'une piece [This has hardly started. (At first glance, "this" must mean the job of erecting the monument.) Only one piece is missing]." If the work is just starting, how is it only one piece is missing, unless that piece be both the essential one and a simple one within a simple mechanism, unless it be our missing pronoun? And 10 and behold, the pronoun is missing: "Ne manque plus qu'une piece" has been shorn of its subject. This subject should have been the neutral il; not it as pronoun for a person-noun but a mere grammatical abstraction for the third person, a mere tag for a function and hence an apt symbol for the universal Dies in Hegel's German, r;a in Derrida's French.

Second corroborating ungrammaticality: the paronomasia on redite-redoute (Derrida confessing his fear that when the whole Glas has been gone through, everything will have to be said over again) simply dramatizes Hegel's own dispirited statement. Having demonstrated that the universal is attained through the negativizing of particulars, of the multiple Heres and Nows, Hegel remarks: "natural consciousness, too, is always reaching this result, learning from experience what is true in it." But then, almost sadly, he adds: "it is always forgetting it and starting the movement all over again."27 This sense of helplessness is exactly echoed by Derrida just before he quotes Hegel's letter telling his publisher he is going to repeat himself; and again when Derrida speaks of advancing slowly, painfully, along a gallery of images, a gallery of things, of particulars, to reach at last the Sa, S-a, "savoir absolu" ("absolute knowledge")that is, r;a (this) translated into "universal" code by means of a pun. Slowly, painfully indeed, since the "gallery" of phenomenological stopping points is compared with the stations of the cross. Thus the text is derived a second time from the tirer syllepsis, now through the translation of the syllepsis into a "depression" or "obsessive fear" code. The derivation confirms once again that the significance of the syllepsis is, first, that it functions as a clausula and, second, that it makes sure the reader correctly interprets that clausula as an analogon of the incipit.

To conclude, I shall modify (the better to adapt this trope to the concept of undecidability) the definition of syllepsis as follows: syllepsis consists in the understanding of the same word in two different ways at once, as contextual meaning and as intertextual meaning. The contextual meaning is that demanded by the word's grammatical collocations, by the word's reference to other words in the text. The intertextual mean-

27. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pars. 108-9, p. 64.




ing is another meaning the word may possibly have, one of its dictionary meanings and/or one actualized within an intertext. In either case, this intertextual meaning is incompatible with the context and pointless within the text, but it still operates as a second reference-this one to the intertext. The second reference serves either as a model for reading significance into the text (e.g., point d'eau read as "no water" in a text where it should mean "water," and seems to) or as an index to the significance straddling two texts (e.g., tirer as "reendeavor," halfway between a reference to reprinting and a reference to an engineering feat).28 Thus undecidability can exist only within a text; it is resolved by the interdependence between two texts. And now for a final rephrasing of my definition: Syllepsis is a word understood in two different ways at once, as meaning and as significance. And therefore, because it sums up the duality of the text's message-its semantic and semiotic faces--syllepsis is the literary sign par excellence.

28. Bons it tirer cannot be interpreted as a metaphor since there is no content common to the subverted and subverting meanings (no ground. in I. A. Richards' terminology; no shared semes, in semantic parlance).


riffaterre 1980 syllepsis critical inquiry 6.pdf

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