FIGURES OF THE TEXT PURDUE UNIVERSITY MONOGRAPHS IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES William M. Whitby, Editor Emeritus Howard Mancing, General Editor Enrique Caracciolo-Trejo and Djelal Kadir, Editors for Spanish Allen G. Wood, Editor for French Associate Editors I.French Max Aprile, Purdue University Paul Benhamou, Purdue University Willard Bohn, Illinois State University Gerard J. Brault, Pennsylvania State University Germaine Brée, Wake Forest University Victor Brombert, Princeton University Ursula Franklin, Grand Valley State College Floyd F. Gray, University of Michigan Gerald Herman, University of California, Davis Michael Issacharoff, University of Western Ontario Thomas E. Kelly, Purdue University Milorad R. Margitić, Wake Forest University Bruce A. Morrissette, University of Chicago Roy Jay Nelson, University of Michigan Glyn P. Norton, Williams College Allan H. Pasco, University of Kansas David Lee Rubin, University of Virginia Murray Sachs, Brandeis University English Showalter, Jr., Rutgers University, Camden Donald Stone, Jr., Harvard University II. Spanish J. B. Avalle-Arce, University of California, Santa Barbara Rica Brown, M.A., Oxon Frank P. Casa, University of Michigan James O. Crosby, Florida International University Alan D. Deyermond, Westfield College (University of London) David T. Gies, University of Virginia Roberto González Echevarría, Yale University Thomas R. Hart, University of Oregon David K. Herzberger, University of Connecticut Floyd F. Merrell, Purdue University Geoffrey Ribbans, Brown University Elias L. Rivers, SUNY, Stony Brook Francisco Ruiz Ramón, Vanderbilt University J. M. Sobrer, Indiana University Bruce W. Wardropper, Duke University Volume 39 Michael Vincent Figures of the Text MICHAEL VINCENT FIGURES OF THE TEXT Reading and Writing (in) La Fontaine JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY Amsterdam/Philadelphia 1992 8TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Cover illustration: “Les Deux Pigeons,” by J.-J. Grandville; from Jean de La Fontaine, Fables, illus. J.-J. Grandville (Paris: Fournier, 1838-40). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vincent, Michael. Figures of the text : reading and writing (in) La Fontaine / Michael Vincent. p. cm. (Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, issn 0165-8743 ; v. 39) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. La Fontaine, Jean de, 1621-1695 -- Criticism and interpretation. 2. Books and reading in literature. 3. Reader-response criticism. 4. Authorship in literature. 5. Intertextuality. 6. Allegory. I. Title. II. Series. PQ1812.V56 1992 841/.4-dc20 92008794 isbn 978 90 272 1763 9 (EUR)/ 978 1 55619 306 4 (US) (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 1764 6 (EUR)/ 978 1 55619 307 1 (US) (Pb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 7733 6 (Eb ; alk. paper) © 1992 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa For Shelley Witman Vincent, my wife and best friend Table of Contents Preface ix Note on Editions and Abbreviations xiii Introduction 1 Reading La Fontaine 1 Figures of the Text 8 1. "Hiéroglyphes tout purs": Representations of Writing 11 2. Book, Brain, Body: Citation and the Scene of Reading 21 3. Bodies and Souls: The Intertextual Corpus 41 4. Making the Difference: Textuality and Sexuality 55 5. Inscribing the Voice: Oral Performance and the Written Text 65 6. Description, Representation, and Interpretation 81 7. Reading (through) the Veil 91 Conclusion 109 Notes 115 Works Cited 137 Index 149 Preface This study has two closely intertwined goals. Of course, this is a book about La Fontaine, that is, about his fables, tales, and prose fiction. As such, it is addressed to all La Fontaine's readers, who will, I hope, find in it some thing to enrich their reading of La Fontaine. On another level, this book asks questions about what "reading La Fontaine" meant in the seventeenth century, and means today at a three-century remove from the historical moment in which La Fontaine wrote. In some ways, too, this study is an attempt to reca pitulate within individual texts of a single distinguished writer the history of writing in the French classical period. Literary readings too solidly embed ded in the ideology of voice and presence, our heritage perhaps from this very period, have allowed us to forget other models of reading and writing that are necessarily encoded in the literary product in what I will be calling figures of the text. The central concern of this study is thus to make explicit within the per spective of a general intertextuality the text's attitude toward itself, and the process of the reader's perception of that attitude. I have thus chosen from La Fontaine's corpus a small number of texts to which I have attached commen taries that depend, of course, on my own perceptions, but also on the history of their reading. Each chapter in this study is a reading of a single text as well as a dialogue with other readings. The practical effect of this choice of critical unity is that theoretical notions are developed as the text under consideration calls for them, within a chapter and across the whole essay. If, as I contend, certain texts by La Fontaine are fully elaborated allegories of reading and writing, then the whole text ought to have its say. My choice of this particular handful of texts was usually motivated by a critical problem, an anomaly, a certain difficulty in interpretation to which as a (naive?) reader I wanted some resolution. The sexual identity of the two x Figures of the Text pigeons in "Les Deux Pigeons" in a fable that passes for a love story is a case in point and an example of the kind of critical problem that drew my attention to certain works by La Fontaine. Of course, I believe that these particular texts illustrate something essential about reading and writing in La Fontaine that has not previously been discussed. What I find interesting, however, is how the "detail," the anomaly, the ungrammaticality (in Michael Riffaterre's sense) may serve to figure the whole textual system. My orientation, so to speak, is from the specific- —this quotation, this metaphor, this proper name—to the gen eral—citationality, figuration, onomastics. Henri Meschonnic's phrase "l'œuvre dans la figure" (134) may thus be an apt formula for my approach in this study. While it should be clear that the purpose of this study is not to argue a thesis, or to promote a particular critical doctrine as such, I am nonetheless indebted to the considerable work on reading and writing of the last two decades, especially reader reception theory, theories of intertextuality, and the history and theory of writing, or grammatology. I am, of course, aware that the theorists I cite either in support of my claims, or in opposition to them, often disagree among themselves. Without minimizing important differences, or rehearsing them here, I will in the course of this study display common themes, concerns, attitudes, and approaches in a synthetic work that engages critical writing of all kinds with works by La Fontaine. The Introduction will serve to place this study within the history of read ing La Fontaine, especially that of the last twenty years. It will also explain in more detail what I mean by the title Figures of the Text. Chapter 1 is about writing. As the title of the fable under consideration ("Le Fou qui vend la sagesse") indicates, the fable tells the paradoxical story of how a "fool" man ages to sell wisdom. A wise man seems to resolve the paradox for one buyer, a "dupe," by reading the configuration of elements composing the story of the fool and his dupe as a "hieroglyphic." This fable thus re-enacts a fundamental problem for contemporary as well as classical language theory, the status of writing with respect to speaking. It is what one might call a fable of the fable, for it stages the origins of the fable genre in heterodox modes of nonphonetic "hieroglyphic" writing, thereby begging to be read as a model of its own pro duction as text. Chapter 2 is concerned primarily with reading, but also announces the body as scriptural metaphor, the primary theme of the next chapter. If "Démocrite et les Abdéritains" is best known as a philosophical statement of La Fontaine's Epicureanism, it also exhibits features that make it a powerful demonstration of seventeenth-century textuality. The central episode in the
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