Figures of the Text: Reading and writing (in) La Fontaine

169 Pages·1992·14.29 MB·English

by  Michael Vincent

FIGURES OF THE TEXT
PURDUE UNIVERSITY MONOGRAPHS
IN ROMANCE LANGUAGES
William M. Whitby, Editor Emeritus
Howard Mancing, General Editor
Enrique Caracciolo-Trejo and Djelal Kadir, Editors for Spanish
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Associate Editors
I.French
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Paul Benhamou, Purdue University
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II. Spanish
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Volume 39
Michael Vincent
Figures of the Text
MICHAEL VINCENT
FIGURES OF THE TEXT
Reading and Writing
(in) La Fontaine
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
Amsterdam/Philadelphia
1992
8TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Cover illustration: “Les Deux Pigeons,” by J.-J. Grandville; from Jean de La Fontaine,
Fables, illus. J.-J. Grandville (Paris: Fournier, 1838-40).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vincent, Michael.
Figures of the text : reading and writing (in) La Fontaine / Michael Vincent.
p. cm. (Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, issn 0165-8743 ; v. 39)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. La Fontaine, Jean de, 1621-1695 -- Criticism and interpretation. 2. Books and reading in
literature. 3. Reader-response criticism. 4. Authorship in literature.
5. Intertextuality. 6. Allegory. I. Title. II. Series.
PQ1812.V56 1992
841/.4-dc20 92008794
isbn 978 90 272 1763 9 (EUR)/ 978 1 55619 306 4 (US) (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 1764 6 (EUR)/ 978 1 55619 307 1 (US) (Pb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7733 6 (Eb ; alk. paper)
© 1992 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
For Shelley Witman Vincent, my wife and best friend

Table of Contents
Preface ix
Note on Editions and Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
Reading La Fontaine 1
Figures of the Text 8
1. "Hiéroglyphes tout purs": Representations of Writing 11
2. Book, Brain, Body: Citation and the Scene of Reading 21
3. Bodies and Souls: The Intertextual Corpus 41
4. Making the Difference: Textuality and Sexuality 55
5. Inscribing the Voice: Oral Performance and the Written Text 65
6. Description, Representation, and Interpretation 81
7. Reading (through) the Veil 91
Conclusion 109
Notes 115
Works Cited 137
Index 149

Preface
This study has two closely intertwined goals. Of course, this is a book
about La Fontaine, that is, about his fables, tales, and prose fiction. As such,
it is addressed to all La Fontaine's readers, who will, I hope, find in it some
thing to enrich their reading of La Fontaine. On another level, this book asks
questions about what "reading La Fontaine" meant in the seventeenth century,
and means today at a three-century remove from the historical moment in
which La Fontaine wrote. In some ways, too, this study is an attempt to reca
pitulate within individual texts of a single distinguished writer the history of
writing in the French classical period. Literary readings too solidly embed
ded in the ideology of voice and presence, our heritage perhaps from this very
period, have allowed us to forget other models of reading and writing that are
necessarily encoded in the literary product in what I will be calling figures of
the text.
The central concern of this study is thus to make explicit within the per
spective of a general intertextuality the text's attitude toward itself, and the
process of the reader's perception of that attitude. I have thus chosen from La
Fontaine's corpus a small number of texts to which I have attached commen
taries that depend, of course, on my own perceptions, but also on the history
of their reading. Each chapter in this study is a reading of a single text as well
as a dialogue with other readings. The practical effect of this choice of critical
unity is that theoretical notions are developed as the text under consideration
calls for them, within a chapter and across the whole essay. If, as I contend,
certain texts by La Fontaine are fully elaborated allegories of reading and
writing, then the whole text ought to have its say.
My choice of this particular handful of texts was usually motivated by a
critical problem, an anomaly, a certain difficulty in interpretation to which as
a (naive?) reader I wanted some resolution. The sexual identity of the two
x Figures of the Text
pigeons in "Les Deux Pigeons" in a fable that passes for a love story is a case
in point and an example of the kind of critical problem that drew my attention
to certain works by La Fontaine. Of course, I believe that these particular texts
illustrate something essential about reading and writing in La Fontaine that
has not previously been discussed. What I find interesting, however, is how
the "detail," the anomaly, the ungrammaticality (in Michael Riffaterre's sense)
may serve to figure the whole textual system. My orientation, so to speak, is
from the specific- —this quotation, this metaphor, this proper name—to the gen
eral—citationality, figuration, onomastics. Henri Meschonnic's phrase "l'œuvre
dans la figure" (134) may thus be an apt formula for my approach in this study.
While it should be clear that the purpose of this study is not to argue a
thesis, or to promote a particular critical doctrine as such, I am nonetheless
indebted to the considerable work on reading and writing of the last two
decades, especially reader reception theory, theories of intertextuality, and the
history and theory of writing, or grammatology. I am, of course, aware that
the theorists I cite either in support of my claims, or in opposition to them,
often disagree among themselves. Without minimizing important differences,
or rehearsing them here, I will in the course of this study display common
themes, concerns, attitudes, and approaches in a synthetic work that engages
critical writing of all kinds with works by La Fontaine.
The Introduction will serve to place this study within the history of read
ing La Fontaine, especially that of the last twenty years. It will also explain in
more detail what I mean by the title Figures of the Text. Chapter 1 is about
writing. As the title of the fable under consideration ("Le Fou qui vend la
sagesse") indicates, the fable tells the paradoxical story of how a "fool" man
ages to sell wisdom. A wise man seems to resolve the paradox for one buyer,
a "dupe," by reading the configuration of elements composing the story of the
fool and his dupe as a "hieroglyphic." This fable thus re-enacts a fundamental
problem for contemporary as well as classical language theory, the status of
writing with respect to speaking. It is what one might call a fable of the fable,
for it stages the origins of the fable genre in heterodox modes of nonphonetic
"hieroglyphic" writing, thereby begging to be read as a model of its own pro
duction as text.
Chapter 2 is concerned primarily with reading, but also announces the
body as scriptural metaphor, the primary theme of the next chapter. If
"Démocrite et les Abdéritains" is best known as a philosophical statement of
La Fontaine's Epicureanism, it also exhibits features that make it a powerful
demonstration of seventeenth-century textuality. The central episode in the