Midwest Modern Language Association

Forwarding Addresses: Discourse as Strategy in Barthes and DerridaAuthor(s): Steven UngarReviewed work(s):Source: The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring,1982), pp. 7-17Published by: Midwest Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1314749 .Accessed: 15/02/2012 14:10

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Forwarding Addresses: Discourse as

Strategy in Barthes and Derrida Steven Ungar

I1 crut que les Tropes etaient un peuple. Dumarsais, Des Tropes (1730)

In a I946 article republished in the first volume of his Problems in General Lin-

guistics, the late Emile Benveniste studies the types of discourse derived from the enumerated forms of conjugation. Commenting on various systems of classifi- cation used, he cites the early example of Greek whose inflected forms constitute the "neQoa'ona [prosopa], the personae, the 'figurations' " he sees as parallel to inflections in the noun.1 Pursuing what he finds implied in this system, Ben- veniste arrives at a correlation of subjectivity in which the pronominal "I" located within utterance always remains transcendent to the "you" or "not-I" it posits via utterance. In a later article, Benveniste returns to the relation of persons in the verb, replacing the use of forms with a less abstract use of language. In so doing, he shifts the focus of inquiry to discourse and the structures of utterance. Instead of the earlier model determined by fixed pronouns, Benveniste supplies an alternative approach via the use of language as a discursive relation involving two figures as the source and goal of utterance, what we commonly recognize as the structure of dialogue: "Two figures positioned as partners are alternately protagonists of the utterance."2

Of particular interest is the status of the Greek term proposa equated by Ben- veniste in the 1946 article with personae and figurations along what appears to be a common factor of dramatization. In fact, the term in question would be tran- scribed into English as a form of prosopopeia, the figure of personification in which an absent or dead person is represented as speaking. For Benveniste, the three terms are set into a figurative relation equating a figure of speech, an em- bodied voice, and the process organizing the first term into the second. The

interdependence of these terms strikes me as essential to a peculiarity which makes the study of rhetoric and figures a delicate enterprise: delicate in the sense of ambiguous and thus capable of the reversibility binding any discourse on figures to the figures of discourse. As studied by Pierre Fontanier at the start of the nineteenth century, the figure of speech is not simply an embellish- ment. It organizes an intelligible use of language which, in turn, indicates the resulting discourse can be read. The role of the figure of speech in producing that intelligibility derives from its dual reference: to logic and grammar in one sense, and to the body in another: "Le mot figure n'a df d'abord se dire, a ce qu'il parait, que des corps, ou meme que de l'homme et des animaux consideres

Steven Ungar 7

physiquement et quant aux limites de leur 6tendue. Et dans cette premiee ac- ception, que signifie-t-il? Les contours, les traits, la forme exterieure d'un Homme, d'un animal, ou d'un objet palpable quelconque."3

Language has no body as such beyond the comparisons we tend to make be- tween different modes of expressing meaning and their embodiment as "voices" or "persons." To speak of the figures of discourse is already to make use of a figure, a minor irony which allows the term "figure" to designate both the form of a physical action as well as its product.4 In the discussion to follow, I want to trace a transition from a theoretical discourse on writing in early texts by Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida to a more open pursuit of figuration in the discursive address found in both A Lover's Discourse and La Carte postale. Throughout my discussion, I shall point whenever possible to how discursive address draws the reader into an active construction of meaning by a series of implied associations between author, reader, and narrator. For the sake of clarity, it should also be stated that close reading of two texts readily classified as criti- cal writings within a scope of analysis more common to the reading of fiction reflects the dominant force of figuration beyond the traditional conventions of genre. Or as Barthes quips in A Lover's Discourse, "No novel (though a great deal of the fictive)."5

In Letter XXIX of Les Liaisons dangereuses, the young Cecile Volanges writes to her correspondent, Sophie Carnay, how Madame de Merteuil has agreed to tutor her in the preliminary lessons of love and courtship. Unsuspecting of what might motivate this offer of tutelage, Volanges is equally unaware that the education she is about to begin bears all the signs of an apprenticeship in rhetoric, dialectics, and stylistics: "Madame de Merteuil m'a dit aussi qu'elle me preterait des Livres qui me parleraient de tout cela, et qui m'apprendraient bien a me conduire, et aussi a mieux e&rire que je ne fais: car, vois-tu, elle me dit tous mes d6fauts, ce qui est une preuve qu'elle m'aime bien; elle m'a recommende seulement de ne rien dire a Maman de ces Livres-la, parce que ca aurait l'air de trouver qu'elle a trop n6glig6 mon education, et sa pourrait la facher. Oh! je ne lui dirai rien."6 If we limit the practical aspect of this projected sentimental education to what is described above, the use of language in discursive address- stated or withheld in order to reveal or dissimulate according to interlocutor, moment, and motive-acquires a strategic function that tempers emotion with calculation. Outstripping any concern to communicate is a more immediate objective of self-protection, seemingly at the expense of the other. As a state- ment addressed to an interlocutor, the letter from Volanges to Carnay is already an account at one remove from the statements it claims to report. And to the degree that we accept these statements as serious-that is, at "face value" and without irony-they call for a closer analysis that questions the possibility of a "face value" while promoting a mode of reading patterned on the very strategy and calcultion they attribute to discursive address. Taken seriously-as I believe

8 Forwarding Addresses

they should be-the reported statements cannot serve as metastatements, can- not explain the "original" statements or be detached from them in any way whatsoever. At the very least, they reaffirm the view that discursive address can function in amorous relations as a mode of tactical confrontation.

Referring in A Lover's Discourse to Letter CV from the Marquise de Merteuil to C6cile Volanges, Barthes's lover/narrator finds only the signs of strategy and self-protection. From a theoretical discourse on love to epistolary narration, the transition to dramatic address draws attention to the simulacra equated by Ben- veniste in the I946 article with prosopa and personae. As a case in point, Laclos's I782 epistolary novel stages discourse as a liaison dangereuse in which any state- ment serves as its own forwarding address. As Barthes's lover/narrator ob- serves, the Marquise is not in love and the address she forwards is merely a corre- spondence, "i.e., a tactical entreprise to defend positions, make conquests" (A Lover's Discourse, p. I58). In contrast to the correspondence, the lover/narrator affirms a relation, an address that is primarily expressive and that reveals its de- pendence on the other in the expectation of reciprocal address and an exchange of roles. As an extreme instance of dramatic address, the love letter relies on an ambiguity tying correspondence and relation more closely than the lover/narrator suggests. In the very terms of Laclos's title, semantic ambiguity adds to any liai- son the elements of risk, value and danger which complicate the neat distinction suggested above. To the extent that it is forwarded in the expectation of a re- ciprocal address, amorous discourse is always calculated and tendentious. Yet because that tendentiousness also reveals vulnerability in its very mode of ad- dress, it cannot be equated with the more masterful ploys of a seducer (dragueur).

The love letter is also a noteworthy instance of dramatic address because the

interplay between correspondence and relation simulates the other as a variant of the prosopopeia figure noted earlier. In the argumentum of a fragment entitled "Love Letter," the lover/narrator reasserts a force of language capable of "staging" discourse and distributing the roles of lover and loved one as verbal constructs, nothing more or other than language. As the initial distinction between cor- respondence and relation collapses, so the use of language in dramatic address involves something more than the ostensible function of direct communication: "LETTER: This figure refers to the special dialectic of the love letter, both blank (encoded) and expressive (charged with longing to signify desire)" (A Lover's Discourse, p. I57). To the degree that it reiterates the encoded banalities that make its message impersonal and "empty," the love letter functions as tac- tical correspondence. Yet if we consider that this "emptiness" can also serve as the manifest element or signifier of a second sign, the ambiguity and glibness of discreet address also function as the figure of understatement known as litotes. This remains consistent with the complexities of amorous discourse so long as litotes remains the ploy of a strategy whose goal is more relation than correspon- dence. As a result, the artifice of a blatantly tactical model can simultaneously

Steven Ungar 9

reveal and hide, making the danger of the liaison dangereuse into a semiological matter of knowing how to recognize the signs of love in their essential ambiguity. The more blatant the artifice, the more dramatic the address approaches a self- reflexive activity on the order of a wordly hide-and-seek: "The hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding somethingfrom you, that is an active par- adox I must resolve: at one and the same time, it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't want to show my feelings; that is the message I address to the other. Larvatus prodeo: I advance pointing to my mask: I set a mask upon my passion, but with a discreet (and wily) finger I designate this mask" (A Lover's Discourse, pp. 42-43).

The Latin expression is one readers in Writing Degree Zero may recognize as a motto of Descartes cited by Barthes as a gesture of self-reflexivity and thus an

early instance of figuration. The reference also reminds us that amorous dis- course involves both word and image. When the lover/narrator uses the term relation to designate the exchange of roles between lover and loved one, he in- vokes a category of intersubjectivity studied by Jacques Lacan as the various links between what he terms the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. Be-

yond playful references to the mirror stage in the Roland Barthes. and A Lover's Discourse, substantive ties between Barthes and Lacan go back at feast as far as S/Z and an interest which can be seen as part of a "politics of the Iaginary" that emerged in France in the wake of the events of the spring and summer of I968.7 At the same time, Lacan is undeniably a reader, critic and contemporary of Sartre with a similar concern for questions of existence, being, and value. If Barthes invokes discussions of the Symbolic and Imaginary, we need also to re- call that the culmination of the analytic process as Lacan sees it is, in fact, never achieved: "Le point a quoi conduit le progres de l'analyse, le point extreme de la dialectique de la reconnaissance existentielle, c'est-Tu es ceci. Cet ideal n'est en fait jamais atteint."8 This sounds very much like Sartre's claim in Being and

Nothingness that reciprocity between individuals is uattainable because of an ir- revocable discrepancy betwen the modes of being he terms "for-itself" and "in- itself."

But where Sartre locates the source of interpersonal conflict in an ontology of fixed images of self and other, Lacan studies the function and value of the rela- tion to the image as part of the insertion of the subject into language and dis- course. The clinical context "stages" discourse of a different sort, touching on Sartre's existential psychoanalysis only in the common topics of conflict, identity and being. For Lacan, the ongoing problem of the self-often termed the "problematics of the subject"-is that of its place, position or insertion into the systems of the symbolic and signifying practices it encounters and posits as the "real" world. The trouble with the "real" world is that it comes to be seen as a series of traps, illusions or artifices complicating any notion of reality with the additional orders Lacan terms the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Adding to the

10 Forwarding Addresses

questions of existence and identity a more rigorous inquiry into the processes of

meaning, Lacan recasts the problem of the subject as that of knowing what, if

anything (or any thing) at all, is designated by the use of language practiced by he or she who says "I." Because the use of the first person singular directs lan-

guage toward others, any sense of self invariably confronts discourse as a basic mode of intersubjectivity. As an intense staging of that mode, love is caught up in the problem of the subject as the exchange of language and symbols which, for Lacan, is designated by the very term of relation used by the lover/narrator in A Lover's Discourse: "L'amour est pris et englue dans cette intersubjectivite imaginaire, sur laquelle je desire centrer votre attention; il exige dans sa forme achev6e la participation au registre du symbolique, l'echange libre-pacte, qui s'incarne dans la parole donnee. II s'etage la une zone ou vous pourrez distin-

guer des plans d'identifications, comme nous disons dans notre langage souvent

impr6cis, et toute une gamme de nuances, tout un eventail de formes qui jouent entre l'imaginaire et le symbolique" (Le Seminaire I, p. 242).

For both Lacan and the lover/narrator of A Lover's Discourse, the amorous re- lation occurs in language as a dialogue ideally predicated on exchange and mobility of roles. At the same time, the spatial values suggested by the terms registre, zone, gamme, plans, and dventail limit such interactions to something inherent in the use of language. In this sense, the spatial vocabulary employed by Lacan again points to the metaphoric equivalence ofprosopa, personae and figurations in Benveniste's 1946 article on persons in the verb. Where Lacan alludes to the paradoxes and illusions of amorous discourse in terms of ties /"pris et englues") in an imaginary intersubjectivity, Benveniste approaches them as language used pragmatically. Unsatisfied with the attempts to account for the self via ques- tions of being, Benveniste limits his comments to the differences between ideal conditions and the more specific uses he describes as instances of discourse. Sense of self, he writes, is experienced mainly as the difference of "person" projected by the first-person singular. As Benveniste quips, whoever says "ego" is "ego," which also suggests that the abstract notion of dialogue posits a polarity be- tween "I" and "you" that is seldom reciprocal in pragmatic usage: "This polarity does not mean either equality or symmetry: 'ego' always has a position of trans- cendence with regard to you. Nevertheless, neither of the terms can be con- ceived of without the other; they are complementary, although according to an 'interior/exterior' opposition, and, at the same time, they are reversible" (Ben- veniste, Problems in General Linguistics, p. 225). As Benveniste concludes, the lack of a parallel or equivalent to this opposition in other forms of communica- tion underlines the unique condition of human language.

Playing on what is implied in Benveniste's studies, Barthes writes the amor- ous address of A Lover's Discourse to heighten textual and thematic effects by the very differences between linguistic forms and figuration. Within what Ben- veniste terms the mechanism of utterance, the loved one is not simply a silent

Steven Ungar 11

partner, not just a figure in the text. The detail is important; for the figures in question are those of the lover/narrator who addresses the other fully aware that the one-sidedness of the discourse would overwhelm the loved one were it not given in expectation of a future address in kind: "Whence the cruel para- dox of the dedication: I seek at all costs to give you what smothers you" (A Lover's Discourse, p. 79). The loved one present in A Lover's Discourse is neither figure nor fetish, but the product of a discursive force which, following Benveniste's studies, is irreducible to the standard categories of linguistic analysis. Because he sees that irreducibility in its potential for dramatic expression, Barthes also succeeds in drawing the reader into the discursive relation via the structures of desire he describes at the start of The Pleasure of the Text. By affirming a dis- course of love over and against purely theoretical concerns, the lover/narrator addresses an other whose function-the absent/present quality of the prosopa -

implicates the reader in a process of progressive identification. Because that identification derives from both the structure and use of language described by Benveniste, the amorous discourse acquires completion as directed toward the reader who is a double or supplement, as an effect of the onesidedness of the lover's/narrator's address. Were A Lover's Discourse simply a variant of fictional narrative, that completion would be well within the predictable scope of episto- lary writing. Yet since a theoretical question also animates A Lover's Discourse, the complication of fictional and critical writings leaves its specific mode of ad- dress as something other than suitable to straightforward analysis by genre. And therein is the displacement Barthes uses as textual effect to stage the implied absence/presence of the reader as supplementary figure to the prosopa of amorous address in A Lover's Discourse.

Je parlerai, donc, d'une lettre. Derrida, "La Differance" (1968)

Neither one nor two .. . letters. No letters, in fact, at all. But cartes postales as a strategic writing to dramatize the interplay between word and image via what Derrida describes as the effet postal of telecommunication. Some twenty years after Roman Jakobson's celebrated schema of communications in his "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics," the study of how meaning is produced has taken on trappings intelligible to most readers as those of literary narrative . . .

with/by a diffrance. Those attuned to French critical practices are likely to asso- ciate the interplay between word and image with Lacan's studies of the Imaginary in language, a notion that discourages attempts to approach a text like Derrida's La Carte postale solely as a critical writing. The very force of writing itself ef- fects this discouragement and displacement, acknowledged in such early texts

by Derrida as "Force and Signification" and "La Differance." Yet rather than insist on these texts as critiques operating at the conceptual level, there is good reason at present to affirm their place in Derrida's wider strategy of subverting

12 Forwarding Addresses

formalist practice at the level of writing. In this sense, those who believe that Of Grammatology forever relegates voice to a secondary role in writing are likely to mistake La Carte postale for a counterstatement of sorts, one which compli- cates the view that critical writing displaces textual effects in the cause of dialec- tics or conceptual rigor. Where Derrida's writings tend to be read nowadays as conceptual critiques of literary and philosophical thinking-especially those texts written before Glas (I974) and especially those texts only now circulating in English translation-La Carte postale extends that critique to demonstrate in its own textual effects that ongoing questions of theory and practice by any other name are closer to questions of theory within practice.

In the case of La Carte postale, one aspect of this demonstration may prove to be welcome to traditional readers of literature because the access to critical con- cerns is cast via allusive ties to writings of Kafka and Blanchot, along with nu- merous supplements borrowed from epistolary and detective narrations. When all this is cast in the first-person singular over 270 pages of messages (the French term used throughout is envois), the textual effects are all but disarming. Surely, the author of these envois -"Jacques Derrida," rather than the implied "I" who writes the individual cartes postales -could not be the deconstructing villain por- trayed by unrepentant humanists as a major threat to literary tradition. Surely? Perhaps not, because perhaps the pointedness of the textual effects ought to arouse the critical doubt of those less vulnerable to the charms of textual effects and more accustomed to seek out the strategy within the effect. Recalling, for example, the arguments in Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology against the priority of the spoken word over writing, one may question the choice of term envoi to designate the written message on the obverse of the postcards. Question it because envoi is a homonym of en voix ("in voice") and thus a poten- tial marker of the prosopa figure. Furthermore, if that choice of term is seen as something other than coincidental, one might wonder how the blurring of dif- ference between written and spoken words supplements the positions taken in Of Grammatology. As a result, the textual effects of La Carte postale lend them- selves to a literary approach whose ties to critical thinking are likely to elicit a continued readership from those accustomed to their peculiar demands on the reader. For the less tolerant, textual effects impose an involvement via a mode of direct address parallel to-and thus also different from-the figurative address noted above in A Lover's Discourse. But where Barthes's lover/narrator plays primarily within literary tradition, the discursive strategy in the "Envois" in- scribes literary charm within a more generalized process of telecommunication.

"Envois" is an opening sequence to three long texts-"Speculer sur Freud," "Le Facteur de la verite," and "Du Tout"-all of which straddle the conventional boundaries between literary and critical writings. It is thus appropriate to add that each of them supplements the others, with no single text discernible as ori- gin or base detachable from the rest. In this sense, La Carte postale is less a

Steven Ungar 13

completed book of discrete sections than a playful distribution of its components. The playfulness is inconsistent, neither the ploy of a program of parody nor the flourish of a virtuoso. In a designated avis au lecteur (more properly an avis a lec- trice addressed both to the reader of La Carte postale and the addressee of the en- vois), we read the following remarks:

Vous pourriez lire ces envois comme la preface d'un livre que je n'ai pas ecrit.

I1 aurait traite de ce qui va des postes, des postes en tous genres, a la psychanalyse.

Moins pour tenter une psychanalyse de l'effet postal que pour renvoyer d'un singulier evenement, la psychanalyse freudienne, a une histoire et a une technologie du courrier, a quelque theorie generale de l'envoi et de tout ce qui par quelque telecommunication pretend se destiner.9

The avis employs a literary convention intelligible to readers as a framing statement cast in a voice or mode distinct from the implied voice of the text that follows. Nothing unsettling here, except for the strange comment at the end of this prefatory statement which invokes a specific date (September 7, 1979) but fails to provide the expected signature or initials that would seal the preface via

personification. In place of the absent signature, we are given a proper name-

"Jacques Derrida"-and a qualifying note to the following effect: "Je regrette que tu ne te fies pas trop a ma signature, sous pretexte que nous serions plusieurs. C'est vrai, mais je ne le dis pas pour m'augmenter de quelque autorite supple- mentaire. Encore moins pour inquieter, je sais ce qu'il en colte. Tu as raison, nous sommes sans doute plusieurs et je ne suis pas si seul que je le dis parfois quand la plainte m'en est arrache ou que je m'evertue encore a te seduire" (La Cartepostale, p. Io).

By acknowledging the conscious invocation of direct address, the author of the "Envois" also mobilizes exemplary forms of deconstructive practice. For

just as the authoritative "I" is collapsed in its presumed identification with

"Jacques Derrida," so the potential identity of the "you" to whom the individ- ual cartes are addressed cannot be considered stable or consistent. In addition, the thematic collapse of conventional roles of communication, as sketched by Jakobson in "Linguistics and Poetics," is promoted by the status of the postcard that the narrator is shown by Jonathan Culler and Cynthia Chase at the Bod- leian Library in Oxford. The illustration on the card represents Plato standing behind Socrates, over his shoulder, dictating (perhaps) what Socrates is about to write. For those acquainted with Of Grammatology, the reversal of roles inspires a playful supplement of sorts, an apocalyptic revelation of Socrates writing Plato: "Je l'avais toujours su, c'etait reste comme le negatif d'une photographie a developper depuis vingt-cinq siecles" (La Carte postale, pp. 14-I5).

14 Forwarding Addresses

By means of this iconic support of the argument found in Of Grammatology, the narrator also supplements word with image, following Lacan's contention that imaginary and symbolic realms converge in relation to a third realm he calls "the real." Playing on the Lacanian model, the "reality" suggested is in- telligible as that of discursive address. The bond between "I" and "you" pro- duced by the envois evokes both the literary tradition of epistolary writing and the argument that telecommunication is irreducible to either the individual or combined discourses of literature, semiology, psychoanalysis, and semantics- all of which makes for a series of associations linking cartes POSTALES to con- cepts of mail (as in bureau de postes) and electronic devices (as in poste-transistor). It is, at the very least, an uncanny basis for a decentered reception theory, so un- canny as to invoke an intertextual bond between Derrida, Lacan, and Poe by making each envoi a kind of purloined letter. (Not for nothing is a revised ver- sion of Derrida's supplement to Lacan on Poe-"Le Facteur de la verite"-one of the texts included in La Carte postale.) Somewhere between the poste as mail and/or media is a third term of authority or police, for the link to Poe's tale also recalls the poste royale (royal mail, royal male?) as institutional force intent on outplaying the Queen's attempts to practice her own brand of telecommunica- tion and infidelity: "Le tout, si possible, au service du roi qui dispose du courrier, des sceaux, des emissaires commes des destinataires, ses sujets. Enfin il voudrait bien voir The purloined letter, et la reine aussi, et Dupin aussi, et le psychanalyste aussi-mais voila, il y a la carte postale qui supporte la partition et qui ouvre toujours du c6te de la litterature, si tu veux bien appeler ya l'adestination. Alors ya ne revient plus circulairement. Aucune theorie rigoureuse de la 'reception', si necessaire soit-elle cependant, ne viendra a bout de cette litterature-la" (La Cartepostale, p. 79).

Writing at a later point in the "Envois" of a train ride during which he re- veals the project of the fiction he is writing as a parody of epistolary modes and introduction to Freud, the narrator provides an even more pointed idea of the textual effects at work throughout the entire book: "Tout ce livre, des astrolo- gies en accordeon, de cartes postales, initierait a la speculation par la lecture de Sp. II n'y aurait finalement que cela, tout pourrait revenir a la description pa- tiente, interminable, serieuse et jouee, directe ou detournee, litterale ou figuree, de la carte d'Oxford. [. .] Ce sera meme un combine, l'ensemble, un appareil emetteur-recepteur: on n'y verra rien, on y entendra seulement des coups de fil dans tous les sens, ce qui lit la carte postale et qui aura d'abord ete lu par elle"(La Carte postale, p. I94). The whirligig of genres suggested by the tendentious status ascribed to the "Envois" section of La Carte postale is a most forceful demon- stration of a deconstructive practice of writing. In this instance, however, a side effect of that demonstration is unambiguously literary in its impact on tra- ditional views of character and modernity. On the question of character, it is Barthes who provides-in S/Z-the pertinent distinction between character

Steven Ungar 15

and figure. After reviewing the kinds of qualities implied by proper name and

pronoun in personifying the character (personnage) of a first person narrator such as theje in Proust's Recherche or Balzac's "Sarrasine," Barthes compares charac- ter to what he finds in the process of figuration: "The figure is altogether dif- ferent; it is not a combination of semes concentrated in a legal Name, nor can

biography, psychology, or time encompass it: it is an illegal, impersonal, an- achronistic configuration of symbolic relationships. As figure, the character can oscillate between two roles, without this oscillation having any meaning, for it occurs outside the biographical time (outside chronology): the symbolic struc- ture is completely reversible: it can be read in any direction. [. . .] As a sym- bolic ideality, the character has no chronological or biographical standing; he has no Name; he is nothing but a site for the passage (and return) of the figure.'10 In the case of the "Envois," the various semantic and literary movements organ- ized by the reader around the first-person pronoun or proper name "Jacques Derrida" are intelligibly those of figuration, a strategic use of indeterminacy wellhoned in the French New Novel and its infamous mise-en-abyme.

Beyond the literary effects of indeterminacy in character, a second effect of the "Envois" fiction is uncanny to the point of repetition. In the fifth chapter of The Castle, K and the Mayor disagree over the meaning of a letter that K claims to have received from Klamm. The argument about the letter turns on the question of authority contained in and by a signature. When K restates that he had been engaged by a landsurveyor, the Mayor points out that all of K's previous contacts with the authorities had been illusory. Neither letter nor

telephone serves as means of real communication: "As for the telephone: in my place, as you see, though I've certainly enough to do with the authorities, there's no telephone. [ . .] In the Castle, the telephone works beautifully, of course; I've been told it's being used there all the time; that naturally speeds up work a great deal. We hear this continual telephoning in our telephones down here as a humming and singing, you must have heard it. Now, this humming and singing transmitted by our telephone is the only real and reliable thing you'll hear, everything else is deceptive."11 From Barthes's lover/narrator to the "I" of the "Envois," the textual force of figuration sets questions of mean-

ing beyond the categories of literary or critical analysis, creating singular effects which these categories can only approach. Among the various strategies used to achieve this singularity, the proliferation of figures is worthy of note because it imposes a rereading of traditional literary texts and conventions . . . with a difference. The literary format used by Barthes and Derrida is marked by the

epistolary fiction of the late eighteenth century, mixing Laclos with the Goethe of Werther. In the "Envois," a supplement of the intimate journal is revised by the artifice of the postcard to mobilize the epistolary mode as a critical demon- stration of the relation of word to image. Where Benveniste's studies on dis- course and pronouns clarify the critical orientation of A Lover's Discourse, the

16 Forwarding Addresses

"Envois" of La Carte postale are more resistant - at least for the moment - to the kinds of speech act analysis one might use to read them. At present, that resis- tance must be seen as polemical, calling for further supplementation as it leaves readers with a challenge to determine exactly what telecommunication might be taking place beyond the humming and singing alluded to in The Castle as the limit of reliabilty. Because for better or worse, reliability is still a virtue sought by readers drawn into the textual dimension of interpretation along the very lines exemplified by Kafka's K. Whether such reliability is feasible or even de- sirable remains to be seen. At the very least, the ultimate outcome of this read- ing process seems likely to depend on an understanding of how the reader is drawn into interpretation via the dangerous analogies promoted between author, narrator, and reader on the basis of forwarding addresses.

The University of Iowa

Notes

1 Emile Benveniste, "Relationships of Persons in the Verb," Problems in General Lin- guistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, I97I), p. I95.

2Benveniste, "L'Appareil formel de l'enonciation," Problemes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard, I974), II, p. 85. (My translation.)

3 Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (Paris: Flammarion, I968), p. 63. 4 Daniel Charles, Rhetorique de la lecture (Paris: Seuil, I977), p. 126.

5 Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, I978), p. 7.

6 Choderlos Laclos, Oeuvres completes, ed. Maurice Allem (Paris: Pleiade, I951), p. 64. 7 Sherry Turkle, Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud's French Revolution (New York: Basic

Books, I978), p. I47. 8Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire I: Les Ecrits techniques de Freud (Paris: Seuil, I975), p. 9. 9Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale de Socrate a Freud et au dela (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne,

I980), p. 7. 0 Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, I974), p. 68.

1 Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, I974), pp. 83-94. In German, the expression "humming and singing" appears as "Rauschen und Gesang."

Steven Ungar 17