The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques Stephen M. Fuller (bio) The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty by Danièle Pitavy-Souques For an academic of Danièle Pitavy-Souques's generation, the profoundly consequential transformations characterizing postwar French intellectual life may have dazzled and seduced as much as they may have perplexed and perhaps disconcerted. While globally celebrated existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, whose precepts Pitavy-Souques regularly synthesizes in her inspiring forty-year engagement with Eudora Welty's canon, continued to command enormous influence, new currents of thought that qualified if not countervailed the insights of existentialism began to assert themselves during the nineteen fifties. Primary among those challenging voices positing an anti-humanistic, structural account of experience, Claude Lévi-Strauss, elaborating in the context of anthropology the insights of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, laid the theoretical groundwork necessary for the emergence of a raft of now-famous theorists whose work remade the landscape of literary studies in the Francophone and Anglophone world. All arguably structuralist in orientation, figures such as the early Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Gérard Genette, and Louis Althusser, sometimes inadvertently, resituated literary study by making visible the philosophical assumptions that conventional literary critics had little questioned and/or ignored. However, this inevitably superficial context, which withholds the name Jacques Derrida and his long list of admirers (including Pitavy-Souques), does supply a starting point for the first essay in The Eye That Is Language because the interpretation supplied of The Golden Apples reveals the lines of the author's preference for the formalism of narratology. Published in 1979, "Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples" essentially supplies a structuralist account of the novel by asserting [End Page 171] that Welty organizes the meaning of the text through a meticulous arrangement of tropes drawn from classical mythology. While stopping short of effecting the death of her author, Pitavy-Souques, not unlike the new critical-inflected readings of American myth critics, whom she sidelines a bit, regards the tripartite form of Perseus defeating Medusa with his shield as not only the key "structure" yielding "three organizing principles" unlocking the significance of the novel but as the myth "central to Welty's thought" (15) more or less throughout her career. Chapter 2 follows chronologically from Chapter 1, presenting the second oldest selection in the volume, thereby establishing at the beginning a central preoccupation of Pitavy-Souques often reasserted in the remaining essays: that Welty has not received in Europe or elsewhere the critical attention that her contribution to modernism justifies. Published in 1987, "A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty" surveys a cluster of Welty short stories and novels to investigate her curious (and for many reviewers over the years baffling) narrative technique that resists the claim to truth implicit in mimetic narrative strategies. For Pitavy-Souques, Welty's uncommon power to challenge and outrage flows from her late modernist reinvention of tropes identified with writers such as Proust, James, Gide, Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf. Among the chief theoreticians and/or philosophers collaterally adduced to develop this argument, Barthes, Derrida, Heidegger, and de Man feature prominently, although at times with less than desirable contextualization. Chapter 3 seemingly disturbs the chronology obeyed in the opening two chapters by inserting the most recent of Pitavy-Souques's examinations appearing in the collection. Unpublished at the close of her career in 2018, "A Rereading of Eudora Welty's 'Flowers for Marjorie,'" in fact, reasserts and elaborates some of the major premises already advanced about Welty's modernism with the addition that Pitavy-Souques in her treatment of this depression-era narrative underscores probably more than earlier in her close reading (a favored hermeneutic that the collection as whole continuously posits) Welty's "political engagement" that the essayist regards as "ever present" (37) in the writer's canon. For example, she finds Welty self-consciously integrating stylistic and technical methods derived from European expressionism and surrealism to stage a political protest encapsulated in the murder at the center of the short...