Ethical Tempo of Narrative Syntax: Sylleptic Recognitions in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract

In inventing the Victorian novel with Pickwick Papers (1836), Charles Dickens — trailing clouds of Augustan wit as filtered and aerated through eighteenth-century comic fiction — has his inebriated hero, risen to the heights of attempted rhetoric in an impromptu speech, fall simultane- ously (19: 254) into a wheelbarrow and sound asleep — as if to say, passing once from public view and out. Syllepsis: that figure of speech in which, typically, a predicate is understood in two different senses with separate objects, whether indirect or direct. In Pope, well before Dickens, the tea that you take when not counsel can stain your new brocade if not your honor. Syntactically, the twinned temporal prongs of the sylleptic effect are not simultaneous exactly, as Dickens would have it — the opposing meanings do not coincide at once. Beyond any mere doubleness of literary ambiguity, syllepsis requires the textual come-again, often an ironic comeuppance, a backtracking. In its narrow miss of grammatical nonsense, syllepsis is for the most part lightly comic (with, as we shall see, notable exceptions). Its almost punning tendency results from the fact that such a rhetorical turn works only if it is discernible enough to catch hold, and be caught, in a tactical double-take. Laughing matters aside, one can see why Derrida recruited the term syllepsis, albeit loosely, to describe Mallarme's hymen entre as indicat- ing both marriage and its prevention by maidenhead, consummated em- brace and the barrier it must overcome. Two polysemous lexemes, hymen standing for marriage and the membrane and entre meaning between, are themselves wedded under syntactic duress. 1 In traditional syllepsis, 1 See Jacques Derrida on this reciprocal contradiction of reference from the aptly named Double Session in Dissemination (221). The differance to be lifted in the marital bond is the coming-between not of union but of its anatomical deferral. What the reciprocal cancel- lation of this phrasing amounts to, for Derrida, is in effect an unraveling (a deconstruction) of the very seam or tuck (what he likes to call the invaginated fold) between definition and functional context, diction and syntax.