Puss-in Boots: Power of Signs. Signs of Power

Abstract

The essay which follows can be considered in several ways: as a contribution to the long and respectable intellectual tradition of the history of ideas and ideologies in their expression by literary texts; as a possible element of comparison in the field of mythological studies between myths and tales belonging to different cultures; as an approach, through an example, to a theory of the text, reading and their effects-an approach roughly characterized by the use of some procedures of structural analysis; as an attempt to define a kind of logic which is not the logic of truth as representation, as adequatio rei et intellectus but the logic of will and desire, or to be more precise, a logic of the weak, of the marginal, of minorities that is a logic of deceit, trick, simulation, lie, a cunning logic that serves as a weapon against the powerful and a way of capturing their power while subverting it. Moreover, this essay is a kind of byproduct of my book La critique du discours, Ctudes sur la Logique de Port-Royal et les Pensdes de Pascal, an application of some hypotheses I articulated therein to an unexpected set of texts: the seventeenthcentury tales. I propose to read a tale which is not actually a folk-tale since it was written by an author whom I consider one of the greatest writers of the seventeenth-century. To be sure, my reading will not be a very serious one: it just deals with a tale, a children's tale from which I shall extract only what seems to me the most pleasurable, the most delightful features of the story. But at the same time, I have imagined my essay as bearing some very pedantic subtitles: Power of signs or Signs of power, or how to do things with words, or language as representation and power, the latter being a kind of Schopenhauerian parody. Subtitles I might rephrase to be more explicit and more pedantic if possible in the manner of the historian of ideas and in the wake of my previous work on the Port-Royal Logic and Pascal: Deception words-powerful speech: a mythical Eucharist in a French seventeenth-century tale. The tale is the Master-Cat or Puss-in-Boots by Charles Perrault. It was published in Perrault's Mother Goose's Tales, Histories or Tales of Past Time with Morals, in 1697. I shall read Le Chat-Bott& in an English translation made in 1729 by Robert Samber. As it may now be evident, my first task is to explain the various subtitles of the essay, to justify my pedantry and in so doing, to reveal my secrets, my tricks, I mean the reading hypotheses I have and that I shall attempt to prove. When I read the tale, I am struck by the important role played by a certain use of language. The main character of the tale, the Cat, appears to be the Master of words in this particular sense that he is always speak-