Flaubert Wrting and Negativity

8/2/2019 Flaubert Wrting and Negativity

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Flaubert: Writing and NegativityAuthor(s): Christopher PrendergastReviewed work(s):Source: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1975), pp. 197-213Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345103 .

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Flaubert:Writing ndNegativityCHRISTOPHER PRENDERGASTIn the opening pages of L'Education sentimentale we encounter the following twosentences: "La campagne etait toute vide. II y avait dans le ciel de petits nuagesblancs arretes, et l'ennui, vaguement repandu, semblait alanguir la marche dubateau et rendre l'aspect des voyageurs plus insignifiant encore." The contextwill, of course, be recalled: Frederic Moreau is on a boat travelling up the Seinefrom Paris to Nogent and it is on this journey that he will make the decisiveencounter of his life with Marie Arnoux. On a hasty reading the sentences appearas a relatively straightforward enumeration of descriptive elements, particulariz-ing the landscape, indicating the movement of the boat, evoking the generalaspect of the passengers on board. A more attentive reading will, however, yieldfurther, more significant qualities; above all the evident care taken over thecomposition of the sentences: the attention to structure and rhythm in a con-scious attempt to create through shape and sound a kind of plastic image orcorrelative of their semantic content. There are, for example, the "blank"quality of the first sentence, the characteristic use of the ternary period, thestrategically placed "vaguement repandu," the weighty, arresting sound of"alanguir," the placing of "encore" after instead of (as is more usual) before"plus insignifiant," again for obvious rhythmic and sonorous effect. Furthermore,if we go back to the sentences after we have read the whole novel, we shall findthat, through their power of suggestion, they reach beyond the immediate contextto integrate symbolically with some of the major themes of the novel: thus, themotifs of void and immobility, boredom and insignificance, adumbrate many ofthe central realities the hero will encounter in the course of his "education."Finally, the sentences could be read in another way: they could be said toreflect, at the micro-level, the principles governing the overall form of the book.As Jean-Pierre Richard has argued, in Litterature et sensation, the creation ofform in Flaubert's fictions proceeds from a tension between the principlesof fluidity and solidification, dissolution and petrification; from an urge to yieldto what is apprehended as the unstructured, dissolving rhythms of life and animpulse to impose order and coherence on those rhythms. Our extract, both inthe content of its dominant images (flux and immobility) and in its own formalstructure (at once free-flowing and yet harmoniously arranged) may be said toreflect the larger dialectic of formal elaboration in Flaubert.1

1 The highly general nature of this essay needs to be stressed; it is intended simply to open up a perspectivethat will be more fully developed elsewhere through a detailed analysis of L'Education sentimentale andBouvard et Pecuchet.


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I have begun with this brief analysis, because to read a short extract like thisand to grasp its implications is to realize what a complex process a properreading of Flaubert involves; how, even or perhaps above all, at the minimallevels of the text, he systematically mobilizes and exploits devices of the greatesttechnical sophistication in the service of the novel form. "Quelle chienne dechose que la prose," he writes in the Correspondance, "Can'est jamais fini, il y atoujours a refaire. Je crois pourtant qu'on peut lui donner la consistance du vers.Une bonne phrase de prose doit etre comme un bon vers, inchangeable, aussirhythmee, aussi sonore. Voila du moins mon ambition (il y a une chose dont jesuis sur, c'est que personne n'a jamais eu en tete un type de prose plus parfaitque moi; mais quant a l'execution, que de faiblesses, que de faiblesses, monDieu!)." 2 The pursuit of this ideal and all that it involved-the famous "affresdu style," the exhausting quest for "la belle phrase" 3-become the centralobjective of Flaubert's whole existence. In a letter to Louise Colet in 1851, whenFlaubert was immersed in the writing of Madame Bovary, he declares: "Je suisun homme-plume. Je sens par elle, a cause d'elle, par rapport a elle et beaucoupplus avec elle." This is by no means a mere literary hyperbole, but a seminalremark, for it represents one of the first fully serious attempts by a writer todefine himself exclusively in and through the practice of writing. In the mostimmediate and profound sense Flaubert is his writing: "L'Art, c'est l'Art seulqui compte" echoes like a refrain throughout the Correspondance and is themeasure of Flaubert's intensity of commitment to the literary enterprise; re-sponsible for the image that comes down to us of Flaubert the exemplary artist,totally dedicated to the literary vocation; of the writer who insisted, throughboth affirmation and example, that the novel is a mode of supreme artisticseriousness, demanding responses of intelligence and sensibility as discriminatingas those demanded by any other high literary form.

2 "What a bitch of a thing prose is, you're never finished, there's always something to be redone. I believenevertheless that one can give it the consistency of verse. A good prose sentence must be like a good line ofverse, unalterable, as rhythmical, as sonorous. There at least is my ambition (there's one thing of whichI'm certain, no-one has ever conceived of a more perfect type of prose than I; but as for the execution ofthe idea, my God, what failings, what failings!)"8 As Roland Barthes has observed, the anguished struggle with the sentence constitutes the very heart of theFlaubertian aesthetic: "Pour Flaubert, la phrase est A la fois une unite de style, une unite de travail etune unite de vie, elle attire l'essentiel de ses confidences sur son travail d'ecrivain." "Flaubert et la phrase"in Nouveaux essais critiques (Paris: Points, 1972, p. 142). In developing his reflection upon the significanceof the sentence in Flaubert, Barthes furthermore offers an insight that is of major importance in thecontext of the present article. Adapting from linguistics the model of paradigmatic and syntagmaticrelations to an analysis of Flaubert's famous "corrections," Barthes points out that the majority ofFlaubert's alterations to the sentence are of a syntagmatic (i.e. combinatorial) rather than paradigmatic(i.e. substitutive) order, and, more specifically, at the syntagmatic level, they tend more towards ex-pansion than towards contraction of the sentence. In other words, for Flaubert the essential problemposed by the sentence is that of its theoretical open-endedness, and it is in this sense that Barthes canspeak of Flaubert as being haunted by "le vertige d'une correction infinie." In more generalized terms,this shows that for Flaubert, the problem of "form" (what Flaubert generally refers to as the aspiration to"perfection") is fundamentally a problem of closure, of arresting the theoretically infinite processes oflanguage. In this respect we may perhaps speak of the Flaubert text as one that hovers between "closure"(striving for the moment of "perfect" expression) and "infinity" (engaged in the infinite play of language);hence the deeply ambivalent impression generated by a reading of Flaubert's major fictions: on the onehand, they present themselves as completed, fully wrought artifacts, and, on the other hand, as ceaselessplay of forms, as activity of writing that never comes to rest in some fixed set of patterns and meanings;as, precisely, in Barthes' words, "des ensembles a la fois structures et flottants."

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Yet it is preciselythat intensity of artisticcommitmentwhich poses what wemight call the "problematic" f Flaubert,a problematicof writing that is by nomeansuniqueto Flaubert,but whichis both acutelypresentin his work and alsohistorically decisive in the sense that it initiates, in the second half of thenineteenth century, a profound change or break within literature that laysthe foundationsfor the emergenceof one of the most importantmomentsof themodern literaryconsciousness.For it has often been suggested that the heroicenergiesinvestedby Flaubert n the questfor the perfectliteraryformrepresentsa certainfetishism of form, a displacement nto the cult of Form of a radicalfailureof the mindto engagewith "life"itself; a reificationof the literaryobjectwhich, although formally perfect, carrieswithin it a certain structure of dead-ness, a kind of spiritualinertnessor impoverishment hat arises directlyout ofthe abstractionof Formas an absolute value in itself from what might looselybe called the "humancontext"of literature.As Henry Jamesonce put it, in anessay to which we shall return ater, there is in Flaubertwhat seems to many tobe a troubling, a disabling disjunction between what James calls the "largeartistic consciousness" and the "meagerhuman consciousness."Thus, for ex-ample, if we turn to the letters written during the composition of MadameBovary,we cannotfail to be forciblystruckby the way in which the huge artisticeffort is paradoxicallyaccompaniedby a violent and prolongedaversion to thehumansubjectmatter of that effort:

Croyez-vous que cette ignoble realite dont la reproductionvous d6goute neme fasse pas tout autant qu'a vous sauter le coeur. Si vous me connaissiezd'avantage, vous sauriez que j'ai la vie ordinaire en execration. . . . On mecroiteprisdu reel, tandisque je l'execre:carc'est en hainedu realismeque j'aientrepris ce roman. . . . La vulgarite de mon sujet me donne parfois desnausees,et la difficulted'ecrire ant de choses si communesencoreen perspec-tive m'epouvante.4

From hese comments(andthere aremanyothers like them)it can be seen there-'fore that Flaubert'sinsistence on the autonomy and the purity of literary"form"rests, in part at least, on an experienceof radical loss or separation-adissolution of what had hitherto been the assumption of a more or less un-problematicalrelationshipbetween literature and "life," art and "reality."Inthis perspective,Art (thatis to say, Form)does not copy life, interpret ife, servelife, embellish life-to bring into play some of the traditionalviews on thefunctionof art-it replaces ife. In its perfectedautonomy, t is at once a rejectionand a substitution.As Flaubertputs it in the Correspondance: Le seul moyen den'etre pas malheureux,c'est de t'enfermerdans l'Art et de compterpour rien4 "Do you believe that this ignoble reality, the reproduction of which disgusts you, doesn't turn my stomachas much as it does yours? If you knew me better, you would know that I execrate ordinary life ....People think I am enamored of the real, whereas I loathe it: for it is out of hatred of realism that I'veembarked upon this novel .... The vulgarity of my subject sometimes fills me with nausea, and theprospect of the difficulty of writing so many more commonplace things fills me with horror."

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tout le reste. ... La vie est une chose tellement hideuse que le seul moyen dela supporter est de l'eviter. Et on l'evite en vivant dans l'Art." In other words,the intensity of the specifically aesthetic commitment in Flaubert inscribes itselfunder the sign of a huge negativity, an act of refusal that seems at bottom to bean existential refusal of the "real" itself. As early as 1846 Flaubert wrote toMaxime du Camp: "J'ai eu, tout jeune, un pressentiment complet de la vie.C'etait comme une odeur de cuisine nauseabonde qui s'echappe par un soupirail.On n'a pas besoin d'en avoir mange pour savoir qu'elle est a faire vomir." 5 Andthis is an attitude that, in varying forms, seems in essence never to have left him:

Je n'ai plus ni convictions, ni enthousiasme, ni croyance. . . . Sous monenveloppe de jeunesse glt une vieillesse singuliere. Qu'est-ce donc qui m'a faitsi vieux au sortir du berceau, et si degoute du bonheur meme avant d'y avoirbu? Tout ce qui est de la vie me repugne: tout ce qui m'y entratne et m'y plongem'epouvante. Je voudrais n'etre jamais ne ou mourir. ... 7'ai la vie en haine.Le mot est parti, qu'il reste. Oui, la vie, tout ce qui me rappelle qu'il faut lasubir. . . . Le seul moyen de vivre en paix, c'est de se placer tout d'un bondau-dessus de l'humanite entiere et de n'avoir avec elle rien de commun qu'unrapport de l'oeil. . . . La vie n'est tolerable qu'a la condition de n'y jamaisetre. ... J'aime a voir l'humanite et tout ce qu'elle respecte, ravale, bafoue,honni, siffle. 6This conflation of remarks from the Correspondance (and there are manyothers that could be added) would seem therefore to represent an attitude that,within certain perspectives, is a singularly unpromising one for a novelist; itseems to speak fairly decisively of a radical paralysis of the spirit, of a sensibility

totally invaded and vitiated by a peculiarly sterile form of ironic awareness, ofcynical contempt for the human experience that must of necessity constitute thesubject matter of the novelist's work. In the light of observations such as these,and to the extent that they are relevant to the kind of literature Flaubert pro-duced, it may therefore be in no way surprising to witness across a whole rangeof otherwise quite different critical traditions, varying from, say, the ContinentalMarxist tradition of Lukacs and Sartre to the Anglo-American tradition of HenryJames and F. R. Leavis, the emergence of a common suspicion of or activehostility to Flaubert. Indeed it may be worth briefly rehearsing here the charac-teristic responses of two of the main representatives of these two differenttraditions: Lukacs and James.

6 "I had while quite young a complete presentiment of life. It was like a nauseous kitchen-smell escapingthrough a ventilator. One has no need to have eaten anything of it to know that it will make you sick."6 "I no longer have either convictions, or enthusiasm or belief. . . . Beneath my envelope of youth therelies a peculiar oldness. What is it therefore that has made me so old right from the cradle and so disgustedwith the cup of happiness even before having drunk from it? Everything of life repels me. I should likenever to have been born, or to die. ... I hate life. There, the word is out and let it stand. Yes, life,everything which reminds me that it has to be undergone .... The only way to live in peace is byplacing oneself at a leap above the whole of humanity and to have nothing in common with it other thana purely observer's relationship. . . . Life is tolerable only on condition of never being in it. ... I like tosee humanity, and everything that it respects, debased, flouted, reviled, hissed at."


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In Studies in European Realism, Lukacs attempts, from within a particularMarxist perspective, to diagnose a "crisis of realism" in which the example ofFlaubert is of central importance. Thus Lukacs writes:

The really honest and gifted bourgeois writers who lived and wrote in theperiod following upon the upheavals of 1848 . .. remained mere spectators ofthe social process. . . . The change in the writer's position in relation to realityled to the putting forward of various theories, such as Flaubert's theory ofimpartiality. ... The new type of realist turns into a specialist of literaryexpression . . . who makes a "speciality" of describing the social life of thepresent.

This alienation has for its inevitable consequence that the writer disposes of amuch narrower and more restricted life-material than the old school ofrealism .If we wish to summarize the principal negative traits of Western Europeanrealism after 1848 we come to the following conclusions:First, that the real, dramatic and epic movement of social happening dis-appears and isolated characters of purely private interest, characters sketchedin only a few lines, stand still, surrounded by a dead scenery described withadmirable skill.Secondly, the real relationships of human beings to each other, the socialmotives which, unknown even to themselves, govern their actions, thoughtsand emotions, grow increasingly shallow; and the author either stresses thisshallowness of life with angry or sentimental irony, or else substitutes dead,rigid, lyrically inflated symbols for the missing human and social relationships.Thirdly (and in close connection with the points already mentioned): details

meticulously observed and depicted with consummate skill are substituted forthe portrayal of the essential features of social reality and the description of thechanges effected in the human personality by social influences.7

This analysis is far from elegant, but the essential point should be clear. WhatLukacs tries to do is to link the so-called temperamental disability in Flaubert(his inveterate cynicism) to a wider crisis of literary culture seen as springingfrom the decisive failure of the 1848 Revolution. After 1848, there appears inliterature, and in particular in the novels of Flaubert, a certain deadness, a funda-mental alienation of literature from life, the literary imagination being no longerengaged, as it was in the time of Balzac and Stendhal, in living social processes,but rather approaching the world, as it were, entirely from the outside. We areconfronted with a kind of inert mass of superficial, meaningless facts to be re-corded with dispassionate or ironic indifference; an imagination which, as such,becomes objectively complicit with or symptomatic of the processes of trivializa-tion and dehumanization at work within that society.If we turn now to our representative of the "liberal" critical tradition, Henry7 Georg Lukacs, Studies in European Realism (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), pp. 141-44.

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James and the essay on Flaubert written in 1902, we find an argument which,although in technical terms quite different, is in its general response to Flaubertstrikingly similar to that elaborated by Lukacs. Discussing the role of "point ofview" in Madame Bovary and L'Education sentimentale, James advances a num-ber of criticisms of the quality of the consciousness at the center of each novel, ina manner that directly implicates the quality of the vision of life offered by theauthor:

Our complaint is that Emma Bovary . .. is really too small an affair ....She associates herself with Frederic Moreau in L'Education to suggest for us aquestion that can be answered, I think, only to Flaubert's detriment. Why didFlaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, suchinferior, and in the case of Frederic, such abject human specimens? . . . If Isay that in the matter of Frederic at all events the answer is inevitably detri-mental, I mean that it weighs heavily on our author's general credit. He wishedin each case to make a picture of experience-middling experience, it is true-and of the world close to him, but if he imagined nothing better for his purposethan such a heroine and such a hero, both such limited reflectors and registers,we are forced to believe it to have been by a defect of his mind. And that signof weakness remains even if it be objected that the images in question wereaddressed to his purpose better than others would have been: the purpose itselfthen shows as inferior .. .8

The crucial emphasis here then is that Emma and Frederic, as the central "reg-isters" of the novels, are simply "too abject and inferior" to sustain our interest.But this is not just a matter of a "technical" error on Flaubert's part; the mattergoes much deeper. For James fully recognizes that the mediocrity of Emma andFrederic is consciously intended by Flaubert and that to criticize Frederic'sand Emma's stature as fictional characters is, finally, to criticize Flaubert's ownintentions ("the purpose itself then shows as inferior"). In other words, Jamesis asserting that Flaubert's insistent concern with banality and triviality derivesfrom a major limitation in sensibility, a fundamental impoverishment at theheart of Flaubert's outlook. As he observes later in the essay:

Might he not have addressed himself to the human still otherwise than inL'Education. . . . When one thinks of the view of the life of his country, of thevast French community and its constituent creatures, offered in these produc-tions, one declines to believe it could make up the whole vision of a man of hisquality. Or when all was said and done, was he absolutely and exclusivelycondemned to irony? . . . His gift was of the greatest, a force in itself, invirtue of which he is a consummate writer; and yet there are whole sides to lifeto which it was never addressed and which it apparently quite failed to suspectas a field of exercise. (pp. 210-11)

For James therefore-to return to a formula introduced earlier-there is in8 Henry James, "Gustave Flaubert" in The House of Fiction (London, 1962), pp. 199-200. My emphasis.

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Flaubert a gulf between the "comparatively meager human consciousness" andthe "absolutely large artistic consciousness" (p. 210).This last phrase calls to mind a similar opposition in Lukacs when, in connec-tion with Flaubert, he speaks of "the contradiction between the subtly artisticpresentation of the subject and the dreary tedium of the subject itself" (p. 170).We find therefore, from quite different backgrounds and intellectual orientations,a curious convergence of James and Lukacs where Flaubert is concerned; from

quite different initial standpoints, they arrive at a more or less common conclu-sion: namely, that for all their formal "beauty," Flaubert's novels suffer from acertain spiritual emptiness; beautiful, but dead, or in Malraux's memorablephrase, "de beaux romans paralyses."

On their assumptions, the arguments of both Lukacs and James are extremelypowerful ones, and have to be taken seriously by anyone interested in Flaubert interms other than those of mere belletristic chit-chat or academic fact-grubbing.Yet I think it has to be argued that such a reading of Flaubert's negativity is infact founded on a radical misapprehension, a failure to enter into the real playof the Flaubert text, that play which, in its vertiginous dissolution of establishedorders of discourse and forms of knowledge, opens up the whole terrain of themodern literary adventure. To appreciate this, we need to work within a theoreti-cal space that is situated beyond the emphases of "humanism" (whether Marxistor liberal) and from within which one can see the "negativity" of the Flauberttext as articulating one of the most authentic and liberating kinds of "criticism"-"criticism" in Nietzsche's sense of the term. That is, we need to see the text asoperating a critical interrogation of the ways in which an intelligible world isboth created and consolidated; an interrogation of those forms of intelligibility,of understanding and interpreting "reality," which in the culture that hasform-ed them go unacknowledged as "forms," but are offered instead as therepositories of absolute truth (an interrogation that will, of course, includethe discourse of humanism to the extent that this too has suffered from a largedegree of petrification). One way of formulating this would be perhaps to saythat Flaubert's negativity is concerned not with a refusal of the real but with arefusal of the Real. This might seem to be little more than a mystifying play onwords, but in fact the difference in emphasis is crucial. It is a way of saying thatwhat the text operates is a subversion of fixity, a negation of fixed, absolute or,better, stereotyped definitions of reality. What fascinates Flaubert, what animatesand nourishes the negative impetus in his imagination, is the figure of theStereotype, those diverse forms of attitude, behavior, language, all the activity ofwhich is to transform provisional constructs of reality into the stereotypedcertitudes of absolute Truth. In this sense, it is preferable to speak of the Flauberttext not as "destructive" (in the sense of some blind nihilistic rage), but, adoptinga term from Jacques Derrida, as "de-constructive," 9 as systematically decon-

9 Cf. Derrida's reference to the idea of an "6criture" that will operate "la d6-construction de toutes lessignifications qui ont leur source dans celle de logos. En particulier la signification de verite." De lagrammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), p. 21. For the Malraux phrase, see A. Jenkins, "Flaubert,"French Literature and its Background (Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 52.

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structing all those particular constructions of reality that are hypostasized, un-critically and complacently, as the Real tout court, the Real in some absolute,fixed sense.In order to focus more clearly the significance of this basic discrimination, Ishould like to cite three brief remarks from the Correspondance, for they seem tome to contain the very core of Flaubert's approach to the problematic relationshipbetween writing and "reality":

Je ne crois seulement qu'a l'eternite d'une chose, c'est a celle de l'Illusion,qui est la vraie verite. Toutes les autres ne sont que relatives. . . . II n'y apas de Vrai, il n'a y a que des manieres de voir. . . . Avez-vous jamais cru al'existence des choses? Est-ce que tout n'est pas une illusion? II n'y a de vraique les "rapports," c'est-a-dire la faqon dont nous observons les objets.l0

The key terms in this set of remarks are Illusion,Vrai, manieres de voir, rapports.Set in both context and conjunction, what Flaubert seems to be expressingthrough them is this: all Reality is Illusion in that "reality" is never a given, fixedentity pre-existing and immediately transparent to the consciousness that simply"apprehends" or "registers" it, but is rather a construction of consciousness, theproduction of a particular "maniere de voir." What, at any given moment or inany given context, is known and offered as "reality," as the intelligible world(for, as Barthes has observed, there is no reality except that which is intelligi-ble),1l is always a construction of reality, generated by a particular "way ofseeing" and organized in the form of a created system of relationships betweenthings. In other words, perception and understanding, or more generally, theactivity of consciousness-and it is this which makes Flaubert's emphasis sostrikingly modern-is not reflective, but constitutive; it does not "reflect" realityas an already given, but constitutes that reality; it constructs an intelligibility, a"truth" through the act of inaugurating and consolidating a system of "rapports"in terms of which things are made to cohere to form a comprehensible world("il n'y a de vrai que les rapports"). It goes without saying, of course, that thestatus of this "vrai," because it is brought into being through a system ofrelations established by a constitutive act of consciousness, is relative ratherthan absolute, conventional rather than natural, formal rather than substantial.What is known as the "true" or the "real" is, fundamentally, a matter of formsof intelligibility,l2 of constructions which, as is witnessed by the evidence ofcultural difference and historical change, are not immutable, natural entities, butare based entirely on convention, articulated through conventionalized codes of

10 "I believe in the eternity of only one thing, it is that of Illusion, which is the only true truth. All theothers are but relative .... There is no Truth, there are only ways of seeing .... Have you everbelieved in the existence of things. Is it not that all is an illusion? The only thing that is true is 'relations,that is to say, the manner in which we observe objects."11 "il n'y a de reel qu'intelligible," Elements de Semiologie (Paris, 1964), p. 106.12 That Flaubert understood that an intelligibility is always a matter of forms is clear from the remark inthe Correspondance: "L'Idee n'existe qu'en vertu de sa forme. Suppose une idee qui n'ait pas de forme,c'est impossible; de meme qu'une forme qui n'exprime pas une idee."

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knowledge and understanding. To put it another way, in so far as they arebased on specific regulative codes and conventions, subject to variation andtransformation, all systems of intelligibility are fundamentally arbitrary. It isthe recognition of the arbitrariness of any given intelligibility that is important,and it is this recognition that yields the real significance of Flaubert's remarkthat it is "illusion" which constitutes the "vraie verite." All systems, all formsof intelligibility are "illusory" in the sense that they are arbitrary constructs,fictional inventions, regulated by internal codes and conventions and thereforewith no claim whatsoever to any privileged (that is, "natural") ontologicalstatus. Beneath and pre-existing the play of human constructions across historyand culture, there is no fixed "truth" with which one of these constructions mighthappily coincide; since they are all arbitrary, what lies beneath them is not aplenitude of original sense, but a void, not a presence but an absence, in short,the Neant. The apprehension of the "neant," of the void which lies beneathand continually threatens the fragility of human constructions of reality, is acentral Flaubertian experience and accounts for a great many of the controllingimage patterns of his fictions (in particular, those of dispersal, erosion, dis-integration).l3 Indeed one might speak here of the experience of a certain vertigedu neant, an experience composed of both exhilaration and panic before, to useone of Barthes' phrases, the perpetual "glissement du sens," a perpetual leakagethrough which all possibility of stable significance slides away into nothingness.

Naturally, such an experience is one that the human mind does not customarilylike to confront; it will prefer the illusory assumption of stability to thetroubling reality of instability. And for the more marked forms of this turningaway from the "neant," Flaubert has a name: "la betise." Flaubert's life-longfascination with the various modes of human "betise" is, of course, well known,and the intensity of that fascination may be simply indicated here by quotingfrom the letter he wrote in Raoul-Duval in 1879 while engaged in the writing ofthat supreme exposure of "la betise," Bouvard et Pecuchet:

Vous me parlez de la betise humaine, mon cher ami, ah! je la connais, jel'etudie. C'est la, l'ennemi, et meme il n'y a pas d'autre ennemi. Je m'acharnedessus dans la mesure de mes moyens. L'Ouvrage que je fais pourrait avoircomme sous-titre Encyclopedie de la betise humaine. L'entreprise m'accable etmon sujet me penetre.14The definitions, descriptions, and illustrations that Flaubert gives of "la betise"are, of course, legion,l5 but unquestionably the most important is his observation,

13 Within the perspectives of "thematic" criticism, these image patterns have been analyzed in detail byJean-Pierre Richard, Litterature et sensation (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1954).14 "You speak to me of human stupidity, my dear friend, ah, there's the enemy and indeed there is no otherenemy. I'm going at it tooth and nail to the best of my ability. The work I am writing could have as asub-title Encyclopedia of Human Stupidity. The enterprise overwhelms me and my subject impregnates me."15For a compilation of Flaubert's diverse remarks on "la betise," see Genevieve Bolleme's introductoryessay ("Flaubert et la betise") to her edition of Le second volume de Bouvard et Pecuchet (Paris:Denoel, 1966).

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"la betise consiste a vouloir conclure. .. ." It consists, that is, in the desire toarrest the infinite play of human constructions of reality, to fill the void with aplenitude of immediately available sense. And, although frequently offered as auniversal condition of the human mind ("nous ne souffrons que d'une chose: laBetise. Mais elle est formidable et universelle"), it is "betise" in this sense ofarrestation that Flaubert sees as the distinctive mark of his own bourgeoissociety ("Dans quel abtme de betise l'epoque patauge! II me semble quel'idiotisme de l'humanite arrive a son paroxysme"). In Flaubert's critical vocab-ulary, "bourgeois" and "bete" are virtually synonymous. What marks thebourgeois is the unshakable refusal to confront the void, the urge to draw overthe void a veil fabricated from a bland and nauseous tissue of reassuring, in-stantly consumable meanings, to create a world with a totally smooth surface,without leaks and gaps, and of which, in his preening self-confidence, massivecomplacency, and opinionated fixity, the supreme representative in Flaubert'snovels is Homais of Madame Bovary.

Here, then, in the opposition of void and plenitude, panic and complacency,skepticism and stupidity, is the core of Flaubert's "negative" vision, the source ofFlaubert's profound insight into his society and the crux of the critique ofnineteenth-century civilization that his work offers. In order further to discussthe implications of this insight and this critique for the kind of fictional writingFlaubert produces, I want to return for a moment to Flaubert's remark aboutthe "maniere de voir" and to suggest a specific link between this remark and thedistinctive mode of social criticism developed in the novels. In the context ofFlaubert's preoccupation with "la betise," one of the possible references of theobservation "il n'y a pas de Vrai, il n'y a que des manieres de voir" is to thosespecifically social and cultural forms of consciousness which offer general andcollective representations of reality, as distinct from purely individual ones.Typically, the operations of social and collective consciousness are the processesthrough which society as a whole constructs, interprets, and legitimates its ownreality as, precisely, Reality. This phenomenon is, of course, well known to thesociology of knowledge. For instance, in their book The Social Construction ofReality, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann comment extensively on thetendency inherent in all societies to "naturalize" the reality they have historicallyconstructed, the tendency to convert a world dynamically produced by a specificsocio-historical praxis into the World tout court, permanent, unalterable, natural.Thus, in the words of Berger and Luckmann, although "social order is not partof the 'nature of things' and . . . cannot be derived from the 'laws of nature,'social order exist[ing] only as a product of human activity," nevertheless thesocial world is habitually experienced by its inhabitants "in the sense of acomprehensive and given reality confronting the individual in a manner anal-ogous to the reality of the natural world." 16The processes of naturalization at work within a given society are necessarily

16 Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 69.

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varied and complex, but one of the essential strategies through which a sociallyconstructed reality is internalized and maintained in consciousness as a taken-for-granted, "natural" reality is in the creation and transmission of whatBerger and Luckmann call a "stock of social knowledge." This knowledge is notprimarily theoretical knowledge; rather it is a diffuse ideology, a body ofopinions, attitudes, beliefs, values which, through the mediation of certainforms of language, are socially objectivated as "knowledge." In short, it is theknowledge of common-sense consciousness, what the consensus of receivedopinion in a given society assumes and offers as Reality. It is what Aristotlecalled endoxon ("current opinion"), and, following Aristotle, we may perhapscall the discourse which repeats and reinforces consensus knowledge the endoxaldiscourse,17 the language of common-sense, the language of the stereotype,whose function is to cover a world historically produced with the mantle of theuniversal and the permanent and of which the classic forms are the maxim,the proverb, the platitude, the idee revue. It is with reference to these endoxalforms of language that Berger and Luckmann can write:

Language becomes the depository of a large aggregate of collective sedimen-tations, which can be acquired monolithically, that is, as cohesive wholes andwithout reconstructing their original process of formation. . . . Furthermore,since human beings are frequently stupid, institutional meanings tend tobecome simplified in the process of transmission, so that the given collectionof institutional "formulae" can be readily learned and memorized by successivegenerations. The formula character of institutional meanings ensures theirmemorability. (my emphasis)18The central, strategic role of the idee revue in the organization of the Flauberttext is, of course, wholly familiar, and its ironic manipulation across all levels ofthe text serves, precisely, to dissolve the "collective sedimentations" of "formula

meanings" which his society draws upon to assure its own reality as Reality.Flaubert's "social criticism" is, hence, primarily a criticism of language, of thoseverbal forms which generate and enshrine a stereotyped social knowledge. Oneway of seeing the Flaubert text is as a huge mobile space of "citations," 19takenfrom that diffuse corpus of other texts which together make up the "natural

17 . . . chaque parler (chaque fiction) combat pour l'hfgemonie; s'il a le pouvoir pour lui, il s'etendpartout dans le courant et le quotidien de la vie sociale, il devient dexa, nature." R. Barthes, Le Plaisir dutexte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973), p. 47. On the connection in Flaubert's thinking between "betise"and "endoxon," see the remark inserted into the plans and sketches drawn up in 1863: "Quel estl'imbecile qui a dit ceci: 'il y a qqun qui a plus d'esprit que Voltaire, c'est tout le monde?'-pas du tout.-ily a quelqu'un de plus bete qu'un idiot, c'est tout le monde-" cit. M-J. Durry, Flaubert et ses projetsinedits (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1950), p. 94.18 Berger and Luckmann, pp. 87-88. In connection with their notion of "sedimentation," it is perhaps worthrecalling that one of the important terms used by Derrida in his project of shattering the assumption of afixed relation between language and "truth" is, precisely, "la de-sedimentation." De la grammatologie,p. 21.19 Literally in the case of the projected second volume of Bouvard et Pecuchet of which Flaubert wrote in theCorrespondance that "il . . . ne sera compose presque que de citations."

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attitude" (to use Husserl's term) of his society, citations which, as they enterthe space of the Flaubertian text, are immediately de-formed, displaced, dis-mantled through Flaubert's numerous strategies of irony. The adventure ofFlaubert's heroes and heroines is essentially a tragi-comic adventure of language,the geography of the problematical terrain they attempt to negotiate con-sisting of a series of stereotyped linguistic forms. The motifs of quest andtravel have been frequently commented on as major thematic and structuraldeterminants of the Flaubert novel; whether in imagination or actuality, Emma,Frederic, Bouvard, Pkcuchet are compulsive travellers. And the journey thatthey make is primarily a textual one; the space they travel through is a textualspace in which they encounter, problematically, all the great endoxal texts ofthe nineteenth century-those of Romantic Love, Art, Politics, Science, Progress,Religion-all those heavily naturalized verbal articulations of reality thatcollapse the moment that the myths they embody are tested against experience.The subversive energy of Flaubert's writing resides largely in the joyous out-playing and undoing of the "myths" of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture.The term "myth" is used here in the precise sense in which it is used by RolandBarthes in his book Mythologies, where myth is understood as a semiologicalsystem the function of which is to disguise the ideological as the natural, aconstructed reality as a permanent order of things, made for all eternity to thespecifications of bourgeois man. Indeed in Mythologies Barthes explicitly refersto Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet as "une veritable restauration archeologiqued'une parole mythique" and to Flaubert's ironic language as the "counter-mythical" demystification of that speech.20 And it is here, finally, that one canperhaps arrive at a proper description of Flaubert's negativity: it is the negativityof the demystifying mythologist who plays havoc with the nineteenth-centurytexts of social knowledge, exposing not only the "ideas" themselves (a fairlybanal operation of satire), but, more importantly, the processes whereby thissocially constructed knowledge is naturalized as absolute knowledge. In otherwords-and it is here that we encounter the real modernity of Flaubert-histext enters, ironically and deconstructively, not only into the content of thenineteenth-century endoxal text, but also into its forms, into the processes of its

20 Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Collection Points, 1970), p. 223. Barthes in fact sees Flaubert's attitude to thecultural codes as marked by a certain ambiguity; thus in S/Z he speaks of Flaubert's irony as "uneironie frappee d'incertitude" (p. 146), and in an interview (Signs of the Times, Cambridge, 1971) remarked,"Flaubert . . . grappled with the cultural codes; he was truly bogged down by them and . . . he tried tofree himself from them by very ambiguous attitudes at once of irony and plagiarism, simulation" (p. 46).Flaubert was fascinated by the codes of nineteenth-century "knowledge" ("la betise de mes deuxbonshommes m'envahit," he wrote of Bouvard et Pecuchet). But this should in no way be taken as implyingany major degree of complicity with those codes. The ambiguity is not of an ethical or ideological order,but is, rather, bound up with the evident delight Flaubert experiences in playing with the cultural codes, aludic engagement that is in fact vital to the ironic deconstruction of the codes. There is a certain pleasureto be derived from this engagement and, in his notes for Bouvard et Pecuchet, Flaubert speaks significantlyof "le plaisir qu'il y a dans l'acte materiel de recopier." We should perhaps interpret the term "plaisir"here in one of the senses developed by Barthes in Le Plaisir du texte: "plaisir" as the eudemonic experi-ence derived from inscribing oneself within the security of known and established cultural forms, set inopposition to "jouissance," the experience of vertiginous dissolution of those very forms (Le Plaisir dutexte, pp. 25-28). What is most radical in Flaubert is situated on the side of "jouissance."

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own production as knowledge; in short, into the play of its codification. What isunmasked is not simply an attitude to the world, but, by a continual pointing tothe social and cultural codes through which the attitude is articulated andstabilized, the claim of that attitude to a kind of natural "innocence."I have said that the activity of demystification sustained by Flaubert's writingengages with nearly all of the great endoxal texts of the nineteenth century.Perhaps the extreme point or moment of that activity is a placing in question byFlaubert's fictions of the text of the Novel itself. For in the course of the nine-teenth century, the novel becomes a strongly naturalized form, deeply complicitin the establishment and consolidation of that "mythical" discourse which seeksto repress the cultural into the natural, to disguise the constitutive activity oflanguage as immediate, transparent reflection of an already given "truth." 21 Thecrux of that development within the novel form is, of course, in its long associa-tion with the notion of Realism, that body of literary doctrine which, at least inits purest, most naive forms, assumes a totally unproblematical relationshipbetween literature and "reality." Despite the view of Flaubert habitually invokedby the conventional literary histories and manuals as the high-priest of theFrench school of literary Realism, Flaubert's own statements on the matterimpress upon us, in characteristically virulent manner, the very reverse. Thus, ina letter to George Sand he writes: "Notez que j'execre ce qu'on est convenud'appeler le realisme, bien qu'on m'en fasse un des pontifes." The sentiment isechoed in another letter to Maupassant: "Comment peut-on donner dans desmots vides des sens comme celui-la: 'Naturalisme'? Pourquoi a-t-on delaissece bon Champfleury avec le Realisme qui est une ineptie du meme calibre, ouplut6t le meme ineptie?"The reasons for this dissociation are manifold and complex, but the essentialpoint is that Flaubert, fully aware of the constitutive nature of the novel (as ofall forms of language), of its dependence on a constructing, organizing "manierede voir," sees through the central assumption of naive Realism, the positivistassumption of reality as simply "out-there," an already constituted, intelligibleReality pre-existing the text and which, in a gesture of innocent representation,the text passively "mirrors." Flaubert in fact grasps what will be the majorrecognition and point of reflection of the modern novel: that the claim of the"realist" novel to being, in Duranty's phrase, "l'expression reelle de tous lesfaits," to being an authentic "copy" of the given world, is an illusion, the func-tion of which (as with all mythical discourse) is to disguise its real identity, whichis, fundamentally, that of a writing of repetition. Flaubert sees that the novelwhich offers itself and is accepted as "realistic" is, in the words of StephenHeath, nothing other than "that which repeats the received forms of 'Reality,'it is a question of reiterating the society's system of intelligibility," 22 a systemthat goes unacknowledged as "system" but which is assumed as being in direct

21 Cf. Philippe Sollers, Logiques (Paris: tditions du Seuil, 1968): "Notre societe a besoin du mythe du'roman'. ... Le roman est la maniere dont cette societe se parle" (p. 228).22 Stephen Heath, The Nouveau Roman, a study in the practice of writing (London, 1972), p. 21.

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conformity with some absolute truth; in brief, the Novel, in so far as it proffersand confirms naturalized modes of seeing and understanding the world, is itselfone of the major forms of "la betise."The vital point to be made here, however, is that this recognition by Flaubertis articulated in and through the very play of his fictions themselves, one of themarks of their originality lying, precisely, in the way that, through their ownactivity, they engineer a certain break or fissure in the ostensibly solid walls ofclassic fictional representation. For instance, the recognition is perhaps there inthe projected ending of Bouvard et Pecuchet where the two heroes were torenounce their hopeless quest for the "truth" to settle for the role of "copiste,"endlessly copying out all the texts which come into their hands. Both the detailsand the general significance of this projected ending have been the subject ofmuch scholarly controversy, but what is certainly clear is that a large part ofthe copying enterprise was to have been devoted to the task of transcribing thetexts of "la betise" (of which Flaubert's own Dictionnaire des idees requeswould almost certainly have been one); what they were to copy were the texts ofstereotyped "knowledge," that is, those endoxal texts that are themselves offeredas, precisely, a "copy" of the Real. Thus, through a complex spiral of self-conscious ironies, we arrive at the absurdity of absurdities: an activity of writingthat is, quite literally, a copy of a copy. And it is in that absurdity that we canperhaps read an analogue of Flaubert's critical approach to the characteristicnineteenth-century attitude to the novel. We have seen that for Flaubert, in sofar as the mirror analogy is at all relevant, it is never in the sense of a directreflection of a "reality" immediately present to the text; what, if anything, thetext "mirrors" is simply another text, namely, the text of "common opinion,"that which expresses the socially established verities of endoxon. To theextent that it is structured by the endoxal, the "realist" novel is therefore asecondary rather than a primary mirror, a mirror at a double remove; it is to beread as a "reflection" of what, in everyday social life, within the terms of thenatural attitude, has already been read as a "reflection" of the Real. In otherwords, like the transcriptions of Bouvard and Pecuchet, the "realist" novel is acopy of a copy.23Thus, in terms of the burlesque parody of Bouvard and Pecuchet's futilecompilations, the negativity of the Flaubertian novel turns finally on the Novelitself, in the degree to which it has become an institutionalized discourse. Insteadof the uncritical repetition and unreflecting confirmation of the stereotype, thenovel of Flaubert, at its most radical moments, initiates a critical deconstructionof the very forms of intelligibility occulted by the "realist" novel. Instead ofthe assumption of the novel as a fixed, stable mirror, passively expressing theReal in its fullness and immediacy, Flaubert's text sets in motion a veritable playof "mirrors,"24 a network of shifting perspectives in which the "real" or the

23 Cf. Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970), p. 61: "Ainsi, le realisme . . . consiste non a copier le reel,mais a copier une copie du reel."24 Cf. Barthes, L'Empire des signes (Geneva, 1970), p. 106: "le miroir ne capte que d'autres miroirs, etcette r6flexion infinie est le vide meme (qui, on le salt, est la forme)."


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"true" can never be caught because it is never "there," its attempted representa-tion perpetually displaced from one reflection to another in an endless processof formation, deformation, reformation: Emma as seen by herself, by Charles,by Rodolphe, by Leon, by Homais; Charles as seen by Emma, by Rodolphe, byHomais; Homais as seen . . . a series of interpretations constructed and de-constructed in an elaborate play of significations that never comes to rest insome definitive utterance, a kaleidoscope of different versions of "reality" throwninto an ironic, self-cancelling interplay of such ferocious intensity that in theend the reader experiences a sense of panic, a radical loss of any fixed point ofmeaning against which he can measure and assess the different perspectives withwhich he has been presented. In that play of perspectives, the text operates asuspension of what Barthes, in his analysis of Balzac's Sarrasine, has called the"hermeneutic code," that code which, across such motifs as quest, mystery,paternity, etc., triumphantly unravels and reveals what the Avant-Propos to theComedie humaine names as the "sens cache" of reality. Take, for example, themotif of travel and quest. In Balzac, the journey is always a voyage of discovery;Rastignac's journey from the provinces to Paris, from the Pension Vauquer tothe Faubourg Saint Germain, entails the gradual discovery of the "laws"(what the text names as the "ultima ratio mundi") that regulate the life of hissociety. In L'Education sentimentale, Frederic Moreau makes a similar journeyfrom the provinces to Paris, but, as the internal reference by Deslauriers to themodel of Balzac's Rastignac makes clear25 (for the expectations generated bythat model are never realized), this represents less a repetition of the motif ofclassic fiction than an ironic re-writing of it. For what does Frederic "discover"?His own answer to a similar question is "Rien!" 26 His journey is a journey ofdispersal and erosion, a journey through structures that ceaselessly dissolvebefore his gaze, leading ultimately to the encounter not with a Truth but a blank,an absence, a void.

Furthermore, this loss of a sense of fixity or finality in the external world, inhistory and society, corresponds to a similar loss in the subjectivity of Frederic."Who is Frederic Moreau?" is a question often asked by criticism. Can he benamed in the way that one can confidently name Rastignac as, for instance,the "ambitieux," the "parvenu"? Unlike the dynamic, integrated personality ofthe Balzacian hero, Flaubert's hero is a nullity, a void; lacking any stable centerof consciousness, Frederic's interiority is an empty space traversed throughoutthe course of the narrative by a plurality of fragmented, dissociated impressionsand sensations that never cohere to form a fully constituted subject. That lack

25 L'Education sentimentale, (Paris: ed. Garnier, 1964), p. 17: "Mais, je te dis la des choses classiques, il mesemble? Rappelle-toi Rastignac dans la Comedie humaine! Tu reussiras, j'en suis sir!"26 "L'Education sentimentale est le roman de l'apprentissage par le vide, de l'apprentissage du neant." J-P.Duquette, Flaubert ou l'architecture du vide (Montreal, 1970), p. 77. But, despite its promising title, Du-quette's book is little more than an extended version of the type of thematic criticism already practicedby Jean-Pierre Richard and Victor Brombert; despite the title, it explicitly engages in a quest for what, inthe preface, Duquette calls the "sens profond" of the novel and hence fails to see that what is mostradical in L'Education is, precisely, the absence of a "sens profond."


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in the consciousness of Frederic has, of course, been often used as a basis forcriticism of Flaubert (we have seen this to be the core of James' criticism). Butthis misses what is most crucial in the creation of Frederic, for what we arewitnessing here are the beginnings of that deconstruction of the full "Cartesian"subject that will be rich in implication for the formal experiments of the modernnovel. Ian Watt has rightly stressed the close relation between Cartesianepistemology and the construction of the solid "character" of classic fiction.27In emphasizing the fragmented and ultimately vacant nature of Frederic's con-sciousness (in the course of his "education" Frederic learns "nothing"), Flaubertdirects his novel toward a subversion of one of the most elementary formalcategories and conventions of the Novel: the convention of "character," thatheavily naturalized literary code which assumes both the natural "essence" of thesubject and its unproblematical "mirroring" by the fiction. This dismantling ofwhat D. H. Lawrence was to call "the old stable ego," 28 with all its consequencesin terms of the undoing of the consolidated discourse of the novel-as-mirror,signals the high point of Flaubertian negativity. Indeed in one of the earlydrafts of Madame Bovary, mirrors were to play a decisively ironic role in theending of the novel. Flaubert planned an ending where Homais, having receivedthe Croix de la Legion d'Honneur, was to walk into a room full of mirrors inwhich, bearing his decoration, he was to strut up and down contemplating him-self in a triumphant act of self-confirmation. Yet, according to the draft, sud-denly the exact reverse was to happen: Homais, the supreme incarnation of theendoxal, of a naturalized bourgeois ideology, massively convinced of his ownreality, of himself as Reality, is seized by a sense of total panic; in the play ofmultiple reflections, the tissue of idees recues that is the personality of Homaisdissolves before an experience of existential doubt, as he wonders whether heexists at all or is simply the arbitrary construction of another consciousness,simply a fictional construct, an illusion beneath which there is not a presence,a fixed substantial Reality, but an absence, a "neant," immediately covered bystereotyped recourse to the famous Cartesian formula:

EpilogueLe jour qu'il (I') recue n'y voulut pas croire. Mr. X depute lui avait envoyeun bout de ruban-le met se regarde dans la glace eblouissement.- .Doute de lui-regarde les bocaux-doute de son existence (delire. effets

fantastiques. la croix repetee dans les glaces, pluie foudre de ruban rouge)-"nesuis-je qu'un personnage de roman, le fruit d'une imagination en delire,l'invention d'un petit paltoquot que j'ai vu nattre/et qui m'a invente pour fairecroire que je n'existe pas/-Oh cela n'est pas possible. voila les foetus. (voilames enfants, voila. voila)27 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London: Penguin, 1963), pp. 12-22.28 D. H. Lawrence, Collected Letters, ed. Harry T. Moore (London, 1962), I, 282.

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Puis se resumant, il finit par le grand mot du rationalisme moderne, Cogito,ergo sum.29This ending was of course never implemented, but just the fact of its existenceas a project is itself of great significance. It suggests perhaps, by way of "con-

clusion"(!), a particular reading of a very famous Flaubertian declaration: "Cequi me semble beau, ce que je voudrais faire, c'est un livre sur rien, un livre sansattache exterieure, qui se tiendrait par la force interne de son style." 30 The dreamof the "book about nothing" has been interpreted in many ways, but in thecontext of the argument I have tried to develop here, we might perhaps read thisas the dream which the modern novel-the novel of Proust, Joyce, Beckett,Robbe-Grillet-will attempt to realize: the novel which refuses any complicitywith the hermeneutic myth of an original truth, of a signifie transcendental (touse Derrida's phrase)31 exterior to its discourse ("ce qui definit le realisme,"writes Barthes, "ce n'est pas l'origine du modele, c'est son exteriorite a la parolequi l'accomplit");32 the novel which instead offers itself as generated and sus-tained solely by its own internal textual activity, as play of forms and "relations"in a ceaseless movement of construction and deconstruction, movement that isnever "concluded" ("la betise consiste a vouloir conclure"), but which remainsforever suspended over an absence.

29 "The day he received it couldn't believe it. Mr. X deputy had sent him a piece of ribbon-puts it onlooks at himself in the mirror. vertigo."Doubt about himself-looks at the drug bottles-doubt about his existence (delirium. fantastic effects. thecross repeated in the mirrors.. torrent lightning flash of red ribbon)-'am I only a character in a novel,the fruit of a delirious imagination, the invention of a mere no-body which I have seen born and who hasinvented me to foster the belief that I do not exist/ Oh, that's not possible. Look, there are the foetuses(there are my children, there, there).'"Then, summing himself up, he finishes with the great dictum of modern rationalism: Cogito, ergosum." Jean Pommier and Gabrielle Leleu, Madame Bovary, nouvelle version (Paris: J. Corti, 1949), p. 129.so "What seems to me beautiful, what I should like to do, is a book about nothing, a book without externalattachment and which would hold together by the internal strength of its style."31 Derrida, De la grammatologie, p. 33.32 Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris, 1964), p. 199.

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