Rupture and the Limits of Reading

Abstract

Explication of texts is really a machine for taming a work --Michael Riffaterre, Textual Production Roland Barthes famously remarked that 1848 is a site of rupture not only in French history, but also in the French novel. After the events of that year, he argues, it is no longer possible to assume an a priori when writing fiction. Balzac, according to this logic, had no stylistic dilemmas when he sat down to write. The was there already, and the choice of writing fiction came with a prose automatically, if not comfortably, ensconced in the passe simple, a sort of linguistic, bourgeois armchair. There are several difficulties with this hypothesis. One need but think of the difference in styles between, for example, Roman comique, La Princesse de Cleves, Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise, Les Liaisons dangereuses and, precisely, Balzac, to note that the passe simple is far from the only principle that puts everything somehow into place. Indeed, one might ask why tense is so privileged in Barthes. One answer to this, of course, is the stucturalist influence which motivated a good deal of Barthes' thinking at the time of Degre zero de l'ecriture. He was, after ail, along with the critic to whom this conference is dedicated, an early proponent of the structuralist project. With Michael Riffaterre and a few others, Barthes demonstrated the rich possibilities of a structuralist archeology in approaching the literary text. Nevertheless, Barthes' particular connection of history and tense in the novel bears further scrutiny. On the one hand, one might argue (with Barthes) that the passe simple betrays a specific notion of time--and of history itself--as firmly embedded in a past that can be viewed retrospectively and thus, to some extent at least, tranquilly. The passe simple, in other words, betrays what Georges Poulet, in another context, called a distanciation. If knowledge is distance, as has so often been claimed, then one might say that the distance provided by the historical past tense places history, precisely, in the past: finished, accomplished, providing the reassurance of closure. And certainly, such distanciation was not available in 1848. Indeed, one of the crises in that year was that the Revolution of 1789 could not (despite the nostalgia that emerged to the contrary) be looked back at--its various agendas and upheavals continued to send shock waves through the uprisings of '48 and, clearly, both structured and defined the stakes of that same uprising. History was experienced as uncannily contemporary, with the past and present blurred to such an extent that, as is well-known, the generation of Flaubert and Baudelaire could only see itself as the undeserving heirs of a long struggle which seemed inimical to closure. Nevertheless, to return to my earlier point, the style (even in Barthes' sense) of a Madame de Lafayette as against that of a Laclos, e.g., cannot be smoothed over as a homologous architecture. From within the of those two writers (whom I have chosen almost at random), a somewhat similar lens on history or, at least, on the past, is escorted by two very different notions of the role and place of the novel, and thus of representation. This is not the place to expand on how differing views of representation produce equally differing notions of mimesis, notions on the function of depiction, or indeed of history itself. But the complexities such difference entails are significant, and must be borne in mind. I would refer you here to the individuation of which Riffaterre argues in Text Production. Following from Riffaterre, I would argue that Barthes' thesis relies on poetics, or generalization. The latter, as Riffaterre notes, tend to keep the reader from seeing the uniqueness from which it stems. (TP 2) In other words, we can accuse Barthes of being guilty of a kind of ideological pleonasm: in his desire to prove that as of 1850, writing was no longer a given, but formed rather a choice (and a political one at that), Barthes relegates all previous French literature to the belief in a preordained order: Le passe simple est donc finalement l'expression d'un ordre, et par consequent d'une euphorie. …