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Structures in Space

—An Account of Tel Quel's Attitude to Meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Graham Dunstan Martin
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At one point of Nathalie Sarraute’s novel Les Fruits d’Or two Parisian intellectuals are discussing the book:

‘To my mind, what causes the—“prodigious” is not too strong a word—the prodigious beauty of this book—and this is why no one passage of it can be taken in isolation—is that it constitutes an experience to my knowledge unique. . . . This book, I believe, establishes in literature a privileged language which succeeds in outlining an analogy which is its very structure. It is an absolutely new and perfect appropriation of rhythmic signs which transcend by their tension what is inessential in every system of semantics. That inessential quality which you have been describing so accurately, dear friend.’ The other, facing him, suffers a brief contorsion, as if ruffled by a sudden gust of wind, then quickly grows calm again, and slowly nods his head: ‘Yes. Of course. It has an élan which abolishes the invisible by grounding it in the ambiguity of the signified.’

Nonsense is usually funny, I suppose, and not often dangerous. It only becomes so when it is erected into unassailable dogma by its adherents, and is then acclaimed by a public who think that what is mystifying must ipso facto be deserving of worship. The ideas of the Tel Quel group are, I am glad to see, being challenged in France itself. I should like to add my voice to that of the challengers—and to Roger Poole’s perceptive remarks in Twentieth Century Studies, May, 1970—and try to explore (as coolly as possible) what seems to me to be the centre of the Tel Quel position, namely its views on the relation between literature and experience. Besides, the exercise may have its own value, in clarifying some of the issues concerned in this perennial problem—though I cannot of course hope to resolve any of them.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 52 , Issue 619 , December 1971 , pp. 541 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

page 542 note 1 Op cit., pp. 92‐93.

page 542 note 2 See for instance, Change 6, p. 10: ‘Literature speaks of language only when speaking of something else’ (Roubaud) and, ibid the footnote on p. 89

page 542 note 3 Théorie de la littérature chosen and translated by T. Todorov, Seuil 1965.

page 544 note 1 Cf. Ogden and Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, and Lyons, John Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (Cambridge), p. 404Google Scholar.

page 544 note 2 ‘Le signe linguistique est donc une entité psychique à deux faces …‘, Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale, p.99. Saussure's analysis may be an inner analysis of what appears as ‘Concept’ in Figure 1, i.e. his ‘acoustic image’ is the mental image of the word and his ‘concept’ the idea for which this stands. However, this possibility does not affect the main issue here, which is the status of the referent.

page 544 note 3 Saussure, op. cit., pp. 100‐102.

page 544 note 4 Saussure himself however remarks on onomatopoeia as a clear partial case of such a connexion. And see for example J‐M. Peterfalvi, Introduction à la psycholinguistique, PUF, Paris 1970, for some interesting further cases of apparently innate human associations of sound with sense.

page 545 note 1 Op. cit., p. 166: ‘… dans la langue it n'y a que des différences sans termes positifs. Qu'on prenne le signifié ou le signifiant, la langue ne comporte ni des idées ni des sons qui préexisteraient au système linguistique, mais seulement des différences conceptuelles et différences phoniques issues de ce système. Ce qu'il y a d'idée ou de matière plastique dans un sign importe moires que ce qu'il y a autour de lui dans les autres signes.’

page 545 note 2 Ibid., p. 160.

page 545 note 3 Op. cit., p. 15.

page 545 note 4 Op. cit., p. 240 if.

page 545 note 5 Essay in Metaphor and Symbol, ed. Knights, L. C. and Cottle, Basil, London, 1960Google Scholar.

page 545 note 6 Kristeva, Σμεωτ, Recherches pour une sémanalyse, Seuil, Paris, 1969, p. 176.

page 545 note 7 See, for instance, New Horizons in Linguistics, ed. Lyons, , Penguin, 1970Google Scholar, particularly the article by J. P. Thorne, pp. 185 ff.

page 545 note 8 Recherches pour une sémanalyse, p. 177.

page 546 note 1 Ibid., p. 178.

page 546 note 2 Ibid., p. 179.

page 546 note 3 Ibid., p. 178.

page 546 note 4 Ibid., p. 181 ff.

page 546 note 5 Ibid., p. 184

page 546 note 6 Ibid., p. 188.

page 546 note 7 Ibid., p. 197.

page 546 note 8 See Sollers, Logiques, Seuil, 1968, pp. 78 ff.

page 547 note 1 Recherches pour une sémanalyse, p. 252.

page 547 note 2 Ibid., p. 253.

page 547 note 3 My italics. Ibid., p. 253.

page 549 note 1 As Owen Barfield suggests in his interesting discussion ‘The Meaning of the Word “Literal”‘ in Symbol and Metaphor, quoted above.

page 549 note 2 Recherches pour une sémanalyse, pp. 263‐264.

page 549 note 3 Sollers, Logiques, p. 209.

page 550 note 1 ‘scriptible’ because the reader is supposed to engage in a creative process akin to writing, when reading them. Such texts consequently involve maximum suggestibility of a maximum of meanings. Texts which are ‘lisibles’ on the other hand contain only a modicum of meanings (like Balzac's Sarrasine). As so often with a Tel Quel notion, a thoroughly valid observation has been pushed to a dubiously valid extreme. For this distinction recalls C. S. Lewis's two‐fold distinction (in An Experiment in Criticism, Cam‐bridge, 1961) of ways of reading into (1) escapist, and (2) re‐creative (and not, of course, recreative). It is clear that a higher level than normal of multiple meanings is a distinctively modern technique for compelling the reader to read in way 2.

page 550 note 2 See, for this phrase, Tel Quel 43, p. 79. It is evidently Chomskyan linguistics that is being attacked.

page 551 note 1 In the normal sense in which we speak of a poem as being ‘musical’, of course, a Sollers or Denis Roche text is markedly unmusical; it also gives an unpoetic, prosy impression. Here, I suspect, is another consequence of Kristeva's view that a text either is or is not poetic. There can be no degrees in ‘ecriture’: language is intended either to relate to the world or not to relate. Consequently, to seek a higher density of poetry in his language is no concern of the ‘scripteur’; and I take it that, in Tel Quel's view, Patience Strong would be as poetic as Hopkins if only the words of both could be assumed to have no referents.

page 551 note 2 A tendency to concentrate above all on the abstract or musical relationships between the words of a poem is already evident in Mallarmé—and to some extent in his disciple Valéry. Cf. Michel Foucault in Les mots et les choses (Gallimard, 1966), p. 313: ‘La littérature se distingue de plus en plus du discours d'idées ….; elle devient pure et simple manifestation d'un langage qui n'a pour loi que d'affirmer—contre tous les autres discours—son existence escarpee; elle n'a plus alors quà se recourber dans un perpétuel retour sur soi, comme si son discours ne pouvait avoir pour contenu que de dire sa propre forme: elle s'adresse à soi comme subjectivitéécrivante, ou elle cherche à ressaisir, dans le mouvement qui la fait naitre, l'essence de toute littérature; et ainsi tous ses fils convergent vers la pointe la plus fine—singuliere, instantanée, et pourtant absolument universelle—, vers le simple acte d'écrire. Au moment ou le langage, comme parole répandue, devient objet de connaissance, voilà qu'il réapparait sous une modalité strictement opposée: silencieuse, précautionneuse déposition du mot sur la blancheur d'un papier, ou it ne peut avoir ni sonorité ni interlocuteur, ou it n'a rien d'autre à dire que soi, rien d'autre à faire que scintiller dans l'éclat de son êitre. ‘This view is not noticeably different from the attitude of Sartre towards poetry, as expressed in Situations II (Gallimard, 1948), where it seems that poetry is ‘l'échec de la communication (qui) devient suggestion de de l'incommunicable’ (p. 86) and ‘les poètes sont des hommes qui refusent d'utiliser le langage’ (p. 63). The source of the disagreement between the Sartrean and Tel Quel schools of thought is that, for Sartre, poetry alone is ‘intransitive’, whereas the rest of literature is ‘transitive’ (to use Barthes’ terms once again); whilst, for the Tel Quel group, everything that is properly literary is ‘intransitive.’ See the account of the discussion at La Mutualité, published in Que peut la littérature, Paris, 1965Google Scholar, and in particular Jean Ricardou's crystal‐clear account of the Tel Quel position.

page 551 note 3 Recherches pour une sémanalyse, p. 273. According to the Sūnyavāda, or doctrine of emptiness, all statements about the phenomenal world could be shown by dialectical argument to be self‐contradictory. For instance, in an argument akin to Zeno's, motion was shown to be impossible—and, by taking the argument further than Zeno did, rest too was invalidated. Thus, reason was incompetent to apprehend reality. The solution lay only in transcending all contradictions in totality, the absolute. (See The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, A Study of the Mddhyamika System, T. R. V. Murti, London, 1955, and particularly Chapter VII.) This apparent appeal to Buddhist philosophy is curious, for Kristeva on the one hand deprecates ‘mystical and esoteric’ interpretations of poetry, and on the other shows no sign of regarding explanations based on reason as merely provisional and relative. In her belief, no doubt, to compare poetry with a Buddhist doctrine is merely to further suggest its irrelevance to experience. But it is ironic that she should herself come so close to presenting us with a ‘mystical and esoteric’ account of it—even though she presumably thinks this particular one meaningless.

page 552 note 1 Ponge, , Le grand recueil, Vol. II, p. 9Google Scholar. One is, not amazed, but amused to read in Twentieth Century Studies, No 3, Jean‐Marie Benoist complaining in traditional continental fashion of English empiricism (p. 54, note 10). It is admittedly naive of the English to think that Dr Johnson's famous gesture of kicking the stone (‘I refute him thus!’) demonstrates anything; but the opposite Gallic extreme of erecting polysyllabic shrines in empty air to mere verbal ingenuity, is hardly more helpful.

page 552 note 2 Op. cit., p. 267.

page 552 note 3 Let me emphasize: even an indirect relationship to life is denied. Barthes goes so far as to write (Essais critiques, Seuil, 1964, p. 164Google Scholar—this passage first appeared in Tel Quel in Autumn, 1961): ‘far from being an analogical copy of reality, literature is the awareness itself of the unreality of language…’ His italics.