Who is the Subject of Enunciation?
John Phillips
10/02/2006
A
useful starting point when answering this question would once again be a
consideration of the function of language.
The common sense response to the question of what language is for is
likely to be that language functions as an instrument of communication. This common sense response, which is not so
much a matter of universal perception but more a symptom of the age, is given
powerful support by the status of knowledge generally and scientific knowledge
in particular, which treats language, as it treats everything else, as
something that can be made into an object of knowledge. These assumptions, that language is an
instrument of communication and that it can be made the object of scientific
knowledge, follow apparently quite naturally from the most pervasive attitudes
that govern knowledge. Knowledge is
attributed to a knowing subject who is capable through his reason of making
judgments about his objects. One of the
tools or instruments at the scientist’s disposal would therefore be his means
of communication, without which this special knowledge would have no means of
dissemination.
These
assumptions are questionable on a number of grounds. What is at stake here would be extremely
powerful because, if language turned out not
to be just an instrument for communication, and if it was not possible, after all, to turn language into an object of
science, then we’d be faced with a discourse that was more powerful and more
fundamental than scientific discourses are currently capable of
comprehending. We would need to develop
an alternative attitude to knowledge.
Language
would be perfectly fit as an object of science only if it was reducible to the
instrumental function of communication.
And, in empirical and formal terms, that is exactly what language seems
to be. We might question its efficiency
and we might question whether it is entirely suited to this function. But so long as we have an instrumental
attitude towards it, language provides us with what we’re looking for: an
instrument. There is something peculiar
in this fact. The way we use language
tends to encourage us to see it as essentially what we use it for. If we use language as an instrument then it
certainly seems to be an instrument.
When we communicate (I send a message which is correctly understood and
perhaps acted upon) language certainly seems to be an instrument for our
communication. So perhaps, when science
takes language as an object of science and establishes a theoretical or a
practical linguistics, all that it is capable of studying is the way language is used.
The only object that linguistics knows under the term language is the instrument of
communication that science uses in order to disseminate its knowledge.
A
number of developments in linguistics and philosophy have made it difficult to
maintain these assumptions. In
Linguistics first, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course
in General Linguistics seems to have had two rather profound long term
consequences. They correspond to a
distinction that he makes early in the lecture course, between langue and parole (a distinction that will have powerful influence on the
development of structuralism and semiotics).
Langue represents the “work of
a collective intelligence” [l’œuvre de l’intelligence collective], which is both internal to
each individual and collective, in so far as it is beyond the will of any
individual to change. Parole, on the other hand, designates
individual acts, statements and utterances, events of language use manifesting
each time a speaker’s ephemeral individual will through his combination of
concepts and his “phonation”—the formal aspects of the utterance. Saussure points out here that the single word
“linguistics” therefore covers two radically different kinds of study. The study of Parole would be entirely focused on individual utterances, using
all the available resources of formal and empirical study to analyze—usually
within a specific language—actual statements.
Whereas the study of langue
would be focused entirely on language generally, which means the most basic and
universal conditions of possibility for any language and any use of language
whatsoever. His Course in General Linguistics thus follows the second route in this
inevitable “bifurcation,” setting out in what has become a decisive historical
event in knowledge, the groundwork for all attempts to grasp the basic
conditions of possibility for language and language use generally.
Firmly
within this tradition, the French linguist Emile Benveniste is responsible for
outlining the need to make a distinction between what he calls the subject of
the énoncé and subject of the énunciation. In two influential arguments Benveniste
focuses on the role and implications of the ubiquitous first person pronoun
(and its reciprocal second person), used at least implicitly in every language
known to man and woman. In “On the
Nature of Pronouns” he notes that the first person, “I,” operates in a way
quite unlike other pronouns because it is essentially linked to the exercise of language. In other words, the sign I links Saussure’s two dimensions of language, the collective
intelligence of langue and the
ephemeral individual acts of parole:
“it is this property that establishes the basis for individual discourse, in
which each speaker takes over all the resources of language for his own behalf”
(220). In fact the I not only links the otherwise
heterogeneous dimensions of langue
and parole but it also keeps its
speakers unaware of this profound difference.
What is peculiar about the signs I
and you is that they are essentially
empty of meaning except when they are being used. So the reality to which I or you refers is solely a reality of discourse. They refer to nothing but the fact that
someone is speaking or has spoken (and nothing changes when we consider
fictional or reported dialogue).
Benveniste states the precise definition for I as follows: “I is the
individual who utters the present instance of discourse containing the
linguistic instance I” (218). By taking the always implicit and often
explicit situation of “address” into account, one has the symmetrical
definition for you: “the individual
spoken to in the present instance of discourse containing the instance you.”
Now after Saussure we know that all signs are intrinsically empty of
meaning, which is determined only in the repetitions of institutions, systems
and events. However, I and you are instances of signs that lack even the possibility of
material reference. These signs cannot
be misused because they “do not assert anything, they are not subject to the
condition of truth and escape all denial” (220). The implications are far reaching. First by indicating the situation of the
speaker yet by escaping the conditions normally attributed to language
(especially when it is regarded as an instrument of communication), the pronoun
tells us something about the relation of the human animal to the language she
speaks. Language is not something the
human subject uses (as Rene Descartes
and the traditions of modernity that follow his lead had always asserted), but
rather, the human subject is something only made possible by language. In his 1958 article, “Subjectivity in
Language,” Benveniste underlines this point:
We are
always inclined to that naïve concept of a primordial period in which a
complete man discovered another one, equally complete, and between the two of
them language was worked out little by little.
This is pure fiction. We can never
get back to man separated by language and we shall never see him inventing it …
It is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man,
and language provides the very definition of man. (224).
We probably should be a little careful here,
because when Benveniste says that language provides the very definition of man,
we mustn’t assume, with theoretical linguistics, that
we know what language is. At this stage
language provides us with the definition of man only because of the peculiarity
of personal pronouns. The foundation of
“subjectivity” is determined, according to him, by the linguistic status of the person:
Consciousness of self is only possible if it is
experienced by contrast. I use I only when I am
speaking to someone who will be a you
in my address. It is this condition of
dialogue that is constitutive of person,
for it implies that reciprocally I
becomes you in the address of the one
who in his turn designates himself as I”
(224-225).
So the basis of subjectivity, if we take language
as a model, would not be those aspects that constitute either its lexical
content (meaning) or its formal and grammatical rules, but it would only be
discoverable in the exercise of
language. It thus becomes necessary to
recognize an irreducible division corresponding to that between enunciation and
statement (énoncé). The subject of the statement seems fixed in
time, a snapshot of a moment that has immediately passed, already fading in its
enunciation. The speaker is already in
principle out of the picture and all that remains is his representative in
language. What this means is simply that
subjectivity comes into being in language alone and that, in speaking, the
human subject is irreconcilably divided in himself. A temporal disjunction between the subject
speaking (enunciation) and the subject represented in speech (statement)
implies that with the single pronoun I,
there are always at least two subjects: a subject who is speaking and a subject
represented in speech. By focusing on
one we necessarily lose sight of the other.
There are instances that bring this situation to light rather
obviously. The old paradox of the Cretan
Liar provides a fine example. When
someone says “I am lying,” the I must refer to a different subject than the one who makes
the statement. When someone says “I am
dead” a similar situation arises. The I in principle (and thus in fact) lives on beyond the I
who speaks. This is easily demonstrated
by the fact that the meaning of the statement is the same whether it is true or
false at the moment of utterance and is destined to be true anyway
independently of any individual speaker or writer. But it is this “at the moment of utterance”
that loses its anchor once we begin to focus on the modality of personal
address. Benveniste reminds us that
“linguistic time is self-referential”
(227). The eternally present moment is
an illusion that covers up or sutures the fundamental disjunction in language
according to which a present moment (the moment of utterance) can only ever
appear as a representation (the
statement).
Benveniste’s distinction plays a
decisive role in the work of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and
Michel Foucault, who are some of the “names” we associate with the category of
critical theory called poststructuralism. For Lacan this distinction in language
corresponds exactly to Freud’s distinction between consciousness and the
unconscious. For Lacan, since the
subject comes into being through language he does so through the exercise of signifying articulation—the
act of enunciation. As soon as he comes
into being he finds himself not as he is
(what Lacan would call the truth of his being) but as he imagines himself to be—that is as a representation (at the level of
the statement). In order to discover the
subject of the unconscious the analyst must focus on the level of enunciation
(performance, expression)—in order to recognize the truth of the subject in the articulation of language—its
enunciation. Lacan puts it like this:
“In order to be situated in the locus of the Other,
the presence of the unconscious is to be sought in any discourse in its
enunciation” (Ecrits 834).
So the relation between statement and enunciation (the said and the
saying) actualizes the divided structure of the psychoanalytic subject and
helps us further to grasp the difference between the imaginary (fixed and
complete image of person) and the symbolic (the constitutive function of
language).
Roland Barthes explicitly draws attention to the
imaginary function of the I
in classic realist fiction in his S/Z. He draws attention to the use of the personal
pronoun as character forming and rethinks the distinction énoncé/enunciation as
that between a character (for
traditional readings) and a figure:
In principle, the character who says “I” has no
name (Proust’s narrator is an outstanding example); in fact, however, I immediately becomes a name, his
name. In the story (and in many
conversations), I is no longer a
pronoun, but a name, the best of names: to say I is inevitably to attribute signifieds to oneself; further, it
gives one a biographical duration, it enables one to undergo, in one’s
imagination, an intelligible “evolution,” to signify oneself as an object with
a destiny, to give a meaning to time. On
this level, I (and notably the
narrator of Sarrasine)
is therefore a character. The figure is altogether different: it is not
a combination of semes concentrated on a legal name, nor can biography,
psychology, or time encompass it: it is an illegals, impersonal, anachronistic configuration of
symbolic relationships. As figure, the
character can oscillate between two roles, without this oscillation having any
meaning, for it occurs outside biographical time (outside chronology): the
symbolic structure is completely reversible: it can be read in any direction …
As a symbolic ideality, the character has no Name; he is nothing but a site for
the passage (and return) of the figure. (S/Z 68).
All of S/Z’s
polarities can be situated on the model of énoncé/enunciation. What is revealed, if anything, is that, above
the bar (on the level of the statement) we find the sum total of
determinations, institutions, codes and systematizations—the whole sedimented
world of the statement and its theoretical conditions of truth and
falsity. Beneath the bar, however, we
find the conditions of discourse itself in an essentially empty sign.
When
a person reads a text then they adopt a position—a place or a space in a
metaphorical sense—that is always partially determined but also always partly
undetermined too. The relation between
the determined and the undetermined in this sense constitutes the difference
between the statement and the enunciation.
Now while it is possible for me to instruct you in the determinate
aspects of reading (and we have done some of this): form and content, history,
biography, reader’s interpretive community, cultural coding or ideology etc.,
it would not have been possible for me to point to—point out—define or delimit—the
indeterminacy that always necessarily accompanies all determinations (meanings,
decisions, choices, relations etc.), as both their condition and their
effect. In other words I’ve been trying
to draw attention to an essential component of both writing and reading that is
strictly not visible or intelligible because it is best understood as a form of
possibility (the most basic component of the experience of time is
“future”). A person and a text meet at
the level called “subject of enunciation” but only in so far as this meeting is
always “yet to come.”
So
if a person reads a text, then they adopt a position that has in advance been
made possible. What are the conditions
of possibility for reading? The
simultaneous effects of instituted meanings (repetitions and regularized
relations) and the undetermined (your possibility of reading). Now a significant mark--granted significance
by its repeatability (a fundamental source of what I called possibility just
now)--must, before it is determined by system or code or decision as meaning
this or that, always also possibly means nothing at all. So the significant mark is also marked by a certain insignificance; to put it less enigmatically--its
meaning is to an extent “not yet determined.”
By being “not yet determined” it is readable and our interpretation has
a chance beyond instituted or established modes of interpretation. The nothing
at all is an a priori condition for all language because if this was not the
case then words would simply mean what they mean and that would be it. Each determination would be a one off. And we’d need a unique mark for each
event. As we know we can use a mark like
“cat” infinitely many times and even with this very simple example it can have
many possible determinations (or meanings).
These conditions are what give us the “subject of enunciation.”
So
the subject of enunciation is strictly
not determined or determinable. Think of
it as a projection of the ideal addressee.
But the ideal—an addressee who would be the final reader—the reader
whose reading finishes off the text and its reserves for once and for all—is
impossible because there seems to be no limit to the possibilities of a text
reappearing in new contexts and meeting new addressees, possibly or even essentially
accidentally, ad infinitum.
The
Archie Bunker scenario that Paul de Man refers to in his “Semiology and
Rhetoric” article (see my commentary on de Man) serves as
an example that demonstrates the rhetorical underpinning of language use. The meaning of Archie’s rhetorical question,
“What’s the difference?” made in response to his wife, who has asked the actual
question, “do you want your laces tied over or under?” can only be decided. There is nothing formal or empirical about
the rhetorical question that determines it as either rhetorical (there’s no difference) or literal (please tell me the difference). No computer, no matter how sophisticated, has
yet been programmed in such a way that it could decide this kind of thing. However, neither Archie nor his wife could be
said to be “subject of enunciation.”
That would rather be indicated by the conditions that the exchange
demonstrates. And neither you nor I will
ever “be” subject of enunciation.
Rather, “being” is what the subject of the statement represents in its
maintenance of the imaginary—radically, there just “is” no being. The example can serve, as it does for de Man,
as a relatively trivial and thus manageable illustration of how the rhetorical
foundation of enunciation can subvert what we might call the standard or dominant reading of a text.
A standard reading would be
the one that a text seems to be proposing for its own interpretation. All texts can be read at the level of
enunciation insofar as an at least implicit I
appeals to an at least implicit you. In the Archie Bunker
case two interpretations of interpretation are proposed by the text: 1) the
rhetorical reading (Archie—even though he may be an unwitting rhetorician in
this case) and the literal or grammatical reading (his wife—who is also
unwitting in this case). This mutual
unwitting-ness would perhaps be a component of the comedy. So a certain narrative irony kicks in and at
the level of enunciation a rhetorical chaos underlying instituted meaning is
revealed. Because of the narrative irony
we are in fact constrained to see the narrator or persona or whatever as a
fictional construct. Radically, of
course, such self-construction can be read as a commentary on what we all do
with our “selves.” But subject of
enunciation need not always be located at the level of who speaks. This is especially true of dramatic
monologue, which usually operates by exposing the fictional persona’s own
conditions in interesting ways for critical reading. In this way literature is sometimes already
doing the work of deconstruction—though each time we’d have to clarify
how. And actually more often the
“framing” of the persona can reveal assumptions at the level of the text (about
truth and falsity, say) that the text itself may contest. Browning’s “My Last Duchess” frames a tyrant
Duke but replicates the terms of the Duke’s tyranny in its own framing
rhetoric.
The
moment that we act on our possibilities as readers (i.e., we determine a text
as meaning this or that) we betray those possibilities. They are what give us the power of
interpretation or determination—human agency, or freedom, to use an old
fashioned term. But that betrayal is
itself always immediately betrayed too by the automatic generating of further
indeterminacies, which necessarily follow every determination. If a text can be read as proposing a theory
or account of interpretation (a theory of truth, for instance), then the
conditions of interpretation that can be read at the level of address, if only
because someone is reading a text, will be in an automatic relationship to it,
which might always be the source of a profound contestation. One way to attempt to avoid these effects might be to simply ally oneself with
the police (and you might guess, correctly, that I am not proposing that we
do)—those institutions which govern interpretations, meanings and truth by
policing through exclusion or containment aspects of the text that threaten the
lawful and legal institutions themselves.
This is what some would call the mystical foundation of authority and
this is the main target of most deconstruction.
Deconstruction
in this understanding would not be what the reader does to the text. The
conditions that we have called deconstruction
would apply whenever an utterance and its enunciation occur. The various kinds of reading that have come
to be called deconstruction (or even deconstructionism for those who like to
be able to identify movements and schools and who thus require the suffix of an
–ism) would certainly be engaged in
exposing the conditions according to which a system or ensemble sets itself up against its own conditions of possibility,
its enunciation, and this activity of reading, this doing deconstruction, would thus have the effect of meddling with
established horizons of thought and action at their very source (which would
anyway have been an illusion).
One
thing that could barely be avoided, then, would be the need to establish these
conditions through the practice of, or at least a meditation on the problems
of, reading. The establishment of person and the basis of subjectivity, we have learned, must be
located in the oscillations of the empty signs I-You, which simply means that a potentially active (though often
passive) reading position is always implied.
Christina Rossetti’s poem, “In an Artist’s Studio,” seems to be
addressing us (and I use the pronoun
advisedly) with statements of the kind that tie into the concerns that we
started with: a consideration of the function—not of language simply this
time—but of representation generally.
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-green,
A saint, an angel—every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
But
first, how do I justify singling out one poem from thousands of possible
examples of discourses that address the conditions of their enunciation? If what we have learned so far is correct,
then there would not be a text without enunciation and thus no text that did
not address its own conditions. The
scientific text, in its practice of deliberately leaving out all references to
enunciation (“This experiment will establish … ”),
nonetheless exhibits an attitude to its own enunciative modality, which we
might think of as negation or denial.
However, my decision to locate what we call a literary text was informed by the nature of what we might call the
institution of literature. In an era
where the dominant notions of truth imply a relation between statements and
states of affairs the role of literature achieves a peculiar status. It would not be possible to establish answers
to the question: “What is literature?” without at least addressing its peculiar
position amongst other discourses (the relationships that Barthes examines in
“Science and Literature,” for instance).
I would guess that all positive
identifications of literature are bound to fail. Literature is distinguished fundamentally by
its status in the multiplicity of different discourses and the special values
attributed to it by virtually everyone, whether they read it or not and whether
they are professional critics and professors or writers of it (and sometimes
both at once). The notion of “poetic license”
exemplifies the situation. The poet can (almost literally in the legal
sense—she is allowed to) write
statements that are free from the normal constraints of the correspondence
theory of truth. So the notion of poetic
license serves as a way of legalizing (metaphorically) a certain abuse of
truth. Rather than contest these
standard and dominant notions, then, literature’s truth actually supports them.
It is the standard notion that grants the license, thus revealing
legalization as a kind of domestication or even pathologization
of a discourse that—if it had ever managed to infiltrate the active discourses
of social reality—would have created merry hell with their notions of truth and
knowledge. So whether literature is
revered or despised it nonetheless nearly always plays the same role—it is
allowed to say whatever it wants because this is the only institution that has
been granted that license.
The
difference, then, between science and literature in some fairly exact ways
replicates the enunciative dimension we indicated earlier that sets the subject
of knowledge up over and against his object.
Literature is regarded, despite protestations to the contrary, as
something subjective—in both its expression and reception—while knowledge in
the true sense of the word would supposedly be objective. The objective criterion of judgment would be
the truth or falsity of the correspondence between statement and state of
affairs, whereas the truth of literature would have to be regarded as that of a
discourse representing subjective thoughts, feelings and experiences. These discourses—supposedly separated and
qualitatively different—merge when we turn to the dominant practices
(maintained in schools and universities around the world) which must take literature
as their object of knowledge. The
establishment of practical criticism
at the beginning of the nineteenth century and its general deployment in
Literature Departments as various kinds of formalism throughout the twentieth
century demonstrates the fundamental complicity between the discourses of
science (including social science) and those of the arts. Practical criticism sets out to analyze the
relationships between ideas and poetic devices, as the following
statement from a late twentieth century foundation course in critical reading confirms:
It is wrong to think that the reading of
literature is just a matter of basking in the emotional glow of a “great
work”. Equally misguided is the idea
that literature itself is concerned only with the emotions and has little to do
with thought. Popular opinion concerning
literary writing sometimes assumes the existence of a sharp distinction between
emotion and judgement, feeling and thought, but this is to ignore the close
relationship which exists between ideas and poetic devices. Metaphors, similes and rhythmically organized
words are not simply vessels for carrying fine feelings, but can equally serve
to convey thoughts and ideas. (Critical
And so the first thing that undergraduate
students would learn on this course is that critical reading must be a matter
of establishing the relationship between content (ideas) and form (poetic
devices). The second thing they would
learn is that literariness (in the sense just given) “is an inevitable presence
in any writing that seeks to persuade,” including perhaps “‘scientific’”
books. Nothing here departs from
assumptions that have their basis in the failure to recognize or accept the
modality of enunciation: a clear distinction between the formal and ideal
aspects of any text; the establishment and identification of formal devices as
tools of communication; the privilege of the observer skilled in making
judgments about his object; the unquestioned faith in the empirical
substantiality of the object itself. But
what, in the modality of enunciation, does the course do? Having established that
poetic language can be found in any kind of discourse, thus effectively
neutralizing anything that might have served to mark the literary out against other kinds of discourse, it
establishes a ground for transferable skills and knowledge in the discipline of
literary study, claiming the literary
as a privileged foundation for critical reading skills that can be applied generally. This simultaneous neutralization and
generalization of the literary in literary
departments indicates in a minor way the sad destiny of literary study. In obvious ways, this text, which emerged in
the 1990s, rescues the common sense of a practical criticism from a perceived
threat represented by the word theory,
which had shadowed the practices of literary study from at least the late 1950s
yet now resides, safely contained within
those same departments, as the “advanced” or “critical theory” modules that
sometimes students are required to take.
The opening statement of the Course
bears this out: “our chosen method should
[my emphasis] focus intensely upon reading rather than upon more theoretical
issues.” Our own practical reading
skills invite us to seize on the modal should
(supported by “it is wrong to” and “misguided is the idea”) in order to ask, by
what authority? Given that forty years
of literary theory preceding the publication of this book has at the very least
put into suspense the form and content and author/reader models of writing and
reading, their blithe perpetuation in foundation courses of literary study
might justifiably be regarded as an interesting symptom or function of a less
visible condition.
At the level of its statement practical criticism takes the statement
itself as its object of study (form and content, sense and reference), thus
supporting all its own assumptions by finding support for them in the text,
which in its usual generous way reflects the approach of its readers. But on the level of enunciation practical criticism continues to support
the very dimension that the difficult critical theory might have created
potential problems for: the most pervasive discourses of knowledge and an
increasingly commoditized culture of knowledge.
The neutralization of the literary is the neutralization of
theory—which, domesticated within literary departments, poses no threat to the
horizons of thought and action that govern the historicity of the age. The idea that “reading intensely” can come before “more theoretical issues” is an
old one and is supported by the ideal of the “unseen” passage—testing students
to see how they “respond directly to the text itself without interference from
what might be irrelevant and inaccurate preconceptions and prejudices” (Critical Reading 57). But the principle of direct engagement
between subject and object, and the principle that relates meaning to the
poetic devices supposed to be their vehicle, constitute profoundly theoretical
(and thus questionable) positions. On
these foundations we’ll never learn what happens when real critical reading is attempted, that is, reading that
establishes its principles of reading from the
untiring attempt to read.
So my turning to a work of literature is
informed not just by historical contingencies that maintain departments of literature
as neutralized or licensed zones for ungrounded knowledge, but also by the
practices of those departments themselves, which fulfill that neutralization in
their teaching and profession. I turn
again to “In an Artist’s Studio.” The
aim is to establish as far as is possible a relationship between the statement
and its enunciation. I say “as far as is
possible” in the knowledge that this is strictly
impossible. The enunciation—the saying
of the said or the process of manufacture that produces the statement—would
have already passed and always be yet to come, in terms of its temporality—the
division between enunciator 1 and enunciator 2 only giving rise to the
perpetual present of the utterance by withdrawing from it. Our reading inserts itself—for this is its
only chance—as it were, between
enunciations. But there are certain
things that we may look out for. We can
establish thanks to the access that each one of us has to our language what the
reading or interpretation proposed by the text seems to be. This aspect can be relatively loose, even
ambiguous, depending on the text, but it does not require the thought of the
extra-textual existence of an author. It
does require our accepting that there will be aspects of a text that lie quite
outside the control of an author and which, therefore, may be in contest with
the way the text proposes we should read it.
The enunciative function, found at the level of address and presupposing
the figure of an I,
can only manifest itself as a self-reflexive component. It will not take a great deal of difficult
training to begin to locate moments that thematize the process of
interpretation itself, through all kinds of devices, whether intended or not
but including those identified by practical
criticism. That way our reading can
be folded over—applied to—the notions of reading thematized and probably
proposed but at least implicitly suggested by the text itself. We can also allow ourselves considerable
critical reflection on the constraints on and possibilities available for our
reading this text.
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer-green,
A saint, an angel—every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
This
sonnet by Rossetti establishes a situation using the resources that language
makes available: person (a speaker—marked by the use of the plural personal
pronoun) and deixis (those screens, that mirror) establishing a sense of
space. The speaker comments on the
situation and provides what will turn out to be a reasonably elaborate
interpretation of it. We might pay
particular attention to tense. The
relationship between past and present would be worth analyzing. I’m not interested in what we can establish
objectively about the relationship between what the poem
“says” and how it says it. I need no ghost of practical criticism come
from the grave to tell me this. If I
speak English I know what the poem says.
The speaker observes many paintings depicting the same face and figure
differently and observes that the figure in the pictures is more lovely and
joyful than their single model seems now—all wan and sorrowful. Its meaning is quite clear independently of
any extra-textual knowledge that might help to illuminate it, such as the note
provided in the Everyman edition of the Poems
and Prose: “believed to be based on a visit to DGR’s
studio, and his many portraits of Elizabeth Siddal. In 1854 Ford Madox
Brown remarked on the many ‘wonderful and lovely’ drawings of Siddal by DGR. At the date of this poem she was wintering in the South of France
for health reasons” (Poems and Prose 433). The note is like a second text. Oddly it requires illumination from the poem
rather than vice versa. The relevance of
the model’s convalescent vacation requires the poem’s commentary on the state
of the model. Without directly proposing
it, however, the note does suggest an interpretation: Rossetti is writing about
her brother’s pictures of this currently sick woman and is thus suggesting a
cause for her sickness in the artist’s conduct.
The note encourages an interpretation of the poem that would read it as
an interpretation of the relation between the artist and his model. So we don’t actually need to know the
biographical details. In this case they
turn out to be irrelevant. However the
suggestion does take us to an interesting discovery. The present tense (Rossetti is writing) ought
really to have been put in the past tense (Rossetti was writing …). In fact the poem creates the illusion of the
present tense, which immediately prizes the text out of what we might have
imagined was its biographical setting. A
basic condition of possibility for reading (and thus for writing) would be this
establishment—again at the level of enunciation—of an imaginary present moment of
reading. What this means is simple: we
can imagine the biographical moment or we may just as well choose to ignore
it—but if it wasn’t for the latter possibility (that we remain ignorant of
biographical details) we would not have been able to imagine the former (the
imaginary biographical setting). This is
how the statement—and the withdrawal of enunciation—works.
So
the message of the poem—its statement—serves as a kind of interpretation of the
paintings: they depict a sick woman as if she was joyful and lovely—either as she once was or as she is imagined to be even now by
the painter, despite appearances. At the
level of enunciation it should be possible to establish the principles of interpretation that the
poem proposes. First the question of interpretation
focuses on a single element, “one face … one selfsame figure … the same one
meaning, neither more nor less,” which is singularly expressed or represented
by a diversity of texts. We might well
ask: expressed or represented? What is
the nature of the relationship between the text and its meaning? Not by chance are these the central questions
of literary criticism. The first four
lines give us some options:
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
The
canvases depict a face that “looks out.”
The face belongs to a “her” who “we found … hidden … behind …
screens.” The pictures are “that
mirror,” which provides the loveliness that is missing from what it depicts,
which remains hidden yet found behind screens.
Each time the canvases are related (by similarity or contrast) to
another kind of surface. The selfsame
figure that looks out of each of the canvases is hidden behind a screen. Yet the canvases reflect the figure by providing more than mere reflection: they
replace what is missing in the model.
Three choices then are set up.
The first remains enigmatic, a peculiar phenomenon, the multiple figures
of a singular gaze. These are not
pictures merely to be looked at. These
are pictures that look out at you. The
second option, indicated by the function of the screen, is that the text hides its meaning behind an alternative
one, its reference behind its sense.
Whether the model is absent or present—whether we find her hidden or find her hidden,
the canvasses keep her hidden, for
these are not her in truth. The third
option is that the canvases function as a kind of reflection but as in a
distorted mirror: this is her each
time but not as she is, not as we
know her now. The combination of canvas
(gazing out), screen (concealing) and mirror (reflecting and distorting)
provides already a complex account of the functions of a text. A text is something that fixes you while
concealing the true nature of the subject, yet reflecting the subject by adding
what is missing from it. Each time, it
is worth noting, a singularity, the “one true meaning,” is enigmatic, hidden,
or distorted. The final six lines,
composing a sentence, push the interpretation of these enigmatic canvases home:
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
Again
the eyes in the painting now address the painter, who “feeds upon her face by
day and night.” It is the eyes which are
given as the site of truth. But these
“true” eyes are not the eyes of her “as she is.” They are true either as she was (in the past) or as he imagines her (an alternative
present). These are the options that the
poem provides. It proposes two possible
theories of truth and tests them out.
The first proposal suggests a correspondence theory, according to which
the statement may be judged true or false in relation to some state of affairs
against which it may be tested. In this
case the canvases and what they are supposed to be representations of do not
match up. On a correspondence theory of
truth the artwork fails miserably. Well
we always knew that. But there are two
possible reasons why: either the correspondence theory still applies and the
artwork can be attributed with truth in the way a photograph can be: this may
not be the situation now but there was a time—the time when they were
painted—when they were bang on true. Or
else this is not a representation of the model but a true representation of the
artist’s desire, his dreams, his imagination. In other words it looks like the poem is
suggesting that we abandon the correspondence theory of truth for artworks and
accept instead an alternative truth for art: the truth of the artist’s
imagination. Except that, if that were
the case, then the sense of loss, the hidden-ness and, frankly, the sickness
and sorrow of the absent “her” would still need to be accounted for in some
way. This truth of the imaginary (and I
would extend this now to the statement) that is attributed to the artist, who
stares into the eyes that stare back at him as if he stares only into the eyes
of his own truth, oblivious of the lie they represent, is arrived at to the
cost of the subject of his paintings (and enunciation). A potential critique of the male romantic
ideal may be emerging. The loveliness of
(masculine) art is won at the cost of the loveliness of (feminine) life. At this level, there’s nothing to choose
between either of the proposed theories of truth. The conclusion (if we go with it) that the
pictures represent the artist’s dream (and not some living thing) could not
have been arrived at without the acknowledgement of the disjuncture
(canvas-mirror-screen) between the artwork and its model. And then one extra-textual “source” (the
model) is replaced by another (the artist).
At the level of enunciation a third “source” emerges: the interpretation
of the “we” in its analytic reading. So
this same one meaning oscillates consistently between at least three
alternative and incompatible determinations that nonetheless are parasitically
dependent upon each other, like the different paintings yoked together by the
same absent meaning. The correspondence
theory fails in two ways: temporally and structurally. In terms of temporality, the disjuncture
would not be unlike the difference between the subject of enunciation and
subject of the statement. Once you
represent yourself in language you become an I severed from the moment of
uttering, the enunciation, which withdraws immediately from the scene. And once you represent a subject in language
or art your subject looks back from a mask already no longer attached to its
origin. The origin in this sense, the
source, was never actually present. The
disjuncture allows a fixing of the idea of the present that is in fact
immediately divided in itself—as the disjuncture. And structurally, the idea or dream of an
origin suffers the disjunction according to which the origin is subject to a
series of displacements, which we may follow part of the way. The “her” who looks back also looks back on
us as we read a text in which the subject is strictly missing. We find
her only behind screens; we find her hidden; we find that she is hidden. Like the “we” of the statement we will find that we might not be able
to come to a decision as to what the “her” that is only ever represented (and
never present) actually is. We can imagine a Rossetti in her brother’s
studio. But we don’t have to. And that fact alone, which is the possibility
of our reading the text at all, means that no text would ever give itself up to
definitive interpretation. The wider
implication is that the correspondence theory of truth and all the
paraphernalia of the statement—predicative logic, truth and falsity, the subject
of knowledge, objective judgments, etc.—rest on grounds that no one will ever
be in a position to comprehend, as a structural condition of possibility for
the judgments that we do make.