Philosophy Through The Looking-Glass

Language, Nonsense, Desire

Jean-Jacques Lecercle

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315522715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

It is generally accepted that language is primarily a means of communication. But do we always mean what we say – must we mean something when we talk? This book explores the other side of language, where words are incoherent and meaning fails us. it argues that this shadey side of language is more important in our everyday speech than linguists and philosophers recognize. Historically this other side of language known as has attracted more attention in France than elsewhere. It is particularly interesting because it brings together texts from a wide range of fields, including fiction, poetry and linguistics. The author also discusses the kind of linguistics that must be developed to deal with such texts, a linguistics which makes use of psychoanalytic knowledge.

This tradition of writing has produced a major philosopher, Gilles Deleuze. This book provides an introduction to his work, an account of his original theory of meaning and an analysis of the celebrated Anti-Oedipus, which takes délire as one of its main themes.

1
The literature of délire

Introduction

A novel where the most extraordinary and absurd adventures merely serve to bridge the gap between the two words involved in a pun; a book of grammar in which it is revealed, by strictly philological means, that Man’s ancestor is not the banal ape, but the frog; a partial translation of Through the Looking-Glass that promptly turns into gibberish, and a commentary in which the poet, eighty years afterwards, accuses Lewis Carroll of having plagiarized him; the story of an American schizophrenic’s life, written in French because the words of his mother tongue cause him physical pain. Roussel, Brisset, Artaud, Wolfson: such is the corpus of what I shall call the literature of délire.

From the start, questions arise about the unity of this corpus, and the name I have chosen for it. Why literature? and why délire? For only two of the texts would normally be called ‘literature’. Roussel was a novelist and playwright, Artaud a poet. But Brisset claimed to be a man of science, and Wolfson wrote the story of his life, which he believed would only interest professional linguists. And yet the most imaginative of the four texts are perhaps not those which are presented as fiction. Beneath the veneer of Brisset’s grammar and ‘science of God’ there soon emerges the violent story of how the frog became man, an epic of cruelty and pain, of war and cannibalism, a tale told by a prophet, full of croaks and fury, signifying much. And Wolfson’s true life story reads like a Bildungsroman. On the other hand, Roussel’s fiction is written like a technical description of machinery, an encyclopaedia of things, and how they work. And Artaud’s is the classic poetic stance of the vates, whose concern is urgent truth, not the superficialities of civilized art. Poetic science, scientific or inspired poetry, truth and fiction are inextricably mixed. Literature is the name for this unholy brew. If confirmation were needed, we might find it in the fact that three of the writers were discovered or rediscovered by the Surrealists: Wolfson is an exception only because he came too late to be hailed as one of the tribe.

So ‘literature’ is an apt characterization of this paradoxical situation. But why délire? Because all four texts engage in shady dealings with language, all four manifest a love for language and interest in its workings both extreme and dubious. As we know, Michel Pierssens has coined a word for this: logophilia, or the love for language that knows no bounds, certainly not those of common sense. The word sounds like the name of a perversion. And a perversion it is: instead of using language as a transparent and docile instrument, and looking through it at the world outside, the four authors focus their attention on its workings, on its dark, frightening origin in the human body. They refuse to conform to the common-sense rule which forbids the users of language to reflect on the material existence of words as produced by certain organs of the body. Stated like this, the position may sound extreme, for after all the linguist does, among other things, just that (he calls it phonetics). But this is precisely what the logophiliac text teaches us: that there is a link between grammar and madness; délire indeed can be defined as the point where they come together. The linguist, extracting langue as a system of differential values out of the concrete situations where language is used, represses its material origin. The denied origin returns in the délire that threatens any linguist in his love for language. Brisset the mad grammarian, Wolfson, who calls himself ‘the demented student of languages’, are exemplary cases. But so, as we have seen, is Saussure.

So I shall adopt a provisional definition of délire: délire is a perversion which consists in interfering, or rather taking risks, with language.

For there are indeed risks. The personal risks of mockery and confinement (all four authors were treated, at some point in their lives, for mental illness, and three of them spent periods in a mental asylum) are perhaps less serious than the risks to personal integrity. Meddling with language, risking délire and madness, means accepting disintegration and struggling to restore the unity of the self. It means abandoning control of and mastery over language. The logophilist no longer speaks through language, he is spoken by it. This is the core of the experience of language in délire: an experience of madness in language, of possession.

But the reward may be greater than the risk. Each of the four authors has experienced that feeling of glory, that conviction that a revelation has been granted to him: a sun burning in Roussel’s breast; the seventh angel of the apocalypse speaking through Brisset; even the more modest Wolfson is overjoyed at the astonishing fecundity of his ideas. And the glory comes where the pain was: in language, for the content of the revelation is the key to language, the total and definitive explanation of its origin, of its workings. The great mystery has been explained at last, and each of the four books constitutes a true myth, that is, a myth revealed, where mind and body, words and things, madness and reason, language and desire act their colourful parts, as in one of the tableaux vivants that one finds on every page of Roussel’s novels.

At this point, it is no longer so easy to dismiss the corpus as one of madness, an instance of delirium in the medical sense, even if, for instance, Roussel’s feeling of glory was described by Janet in his De l’Angoisse à l’Extase (From Anxiety to Ecstasy). Logophilia, because it turns the writer, or the mental patient, into a linguist, concerns each of us: in its glorious myths, there is at least this element of truth, that madness inhabits language, that whether one practises literature, philosophy or linguistics, one has to experience language. The corpus, the strangeness of which I will now attempt to describe, has its unity in the fact that each of the four texts is an experience of language, pursued, without cheating or hesitation, to its ultimate end.

Corpus

Roussel

Raymond Roussel was born in Paris in 1877. He led the life of a wealthy eccentric, publishing novels (Impressions d’Afrique, 1910; Locus Solus, 1914) and verse (Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, 1932) which were received with indifference or ridicule. In an attempt to capture the interest of the public, he turned his novels into plays: they were utter failures, except among the Surrealists. After the completion of his first novel he had an experience of ecstasy followed by acute depression, for which he had to be treated, intermittently, all his life. He committed suicide in Palermo in 1933. Just before his death he wrote a short essay, Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes livres, intended to be published posthumously, in which he gives the ‘key’ to his writings. This enables the reader of Impressions d’Afrique to understand the logic behind the arbitrary events of the novel. But the explanation, itself rather gratuitous, is already the second given by Roussel, for the novel itself provides one. Indeed the structure of Impressions d’Afrique is bizarre: in a foreword the author advises the reader to skip the first nine chapters and start at chapter 10, that is, to read the first part of the text after the second. This, of course, is mere provocation: the reader knows the difference between a novel and a textbook; he must, in a novel, ‘begin at the beginning’ as the King of Hearts ordered the White Rabbit. And, as promised, he is soon lost. On the main square of a purely imaginary African capital, a series of acts, in the theatrical sense, are performed, each more unbelievable than the rest: a marksman manages, by shooting at it, to separate the white from the yolk of a soft-boiled egg; six brothers, because of their extreme thinness and the hollowness of their chests, reflect, by placing themselves at regular intervals, the voice of their father exactly like the echo in the nave of a cathedral; a singer has a mouth and tongue so shaped that he is able to sing, at the same time, four tunes, or the four parts of a canon. Many of these impossible acts involve equally impossible machines. The statue of a Lacedemonian slave (a helot) is made of corset stays. It is set on a base supported by wheels, themselves placed on rails made of a pinkish substance, which turns out to be the lights that cats are fed on. A magpie has been taught to operate with its beak a complex mechanism which tilts the statue, back and forth, on its base.

In the first nine chapters dozens of such wonders are presented, one after the other, without the least explanation, to an astonished reader. The next fifteen chapters provide an explanation, by placing them in a narrative framework: the dynastic quarrels in two African kingdoms, a steamer on its way to America stranded on the African coast, an ordeal imposed on some of the white captives by a rather capricious black sovereign, the desire of the rest of the white people to impress him by showing their best tricks. A host of stories provide a ‘logical’ explanation for each act. Thus, the emperor has, on pain of death, ordered one of the characters to make a statue light enough to be supported on rails made of lights, a substance he had much appreciated when the ship’s cook had prepared it for his dinner. Judging that the task was not difficult enough, he added that the machine should be set in motion by a tame magpie. First we have a tableau vivant, then a fiction which ‘explains’ it, if explanation is the right word, so contorted, gratuitous and absurd is the fiction.

In the posthumous essay, ‘How I wrote some of my books’, Roussel informs us that Impressions d’Afrique, Locus Solus and a few other texts were written according to what he calls ‘the device’ (leprocédé). This device is in fact threefold, or has three stages. The first device consists in taking a sentence, whose words each have two different meanings, and in modifying only one letter in it, so as to obtain another sentence. The writer then proceeds to compose a text which starts with the first sentence and ends with the second. Roussel claims that he used this device for Impressions d’Afrique. The sentence he chose is ‘les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard’ (the letters of the white man concerning the hordes of the old bandit). By changing the ‘p’ in ‘pillard’ to a ‘b’, he obtained the following sentence: ‘les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard’, which, he claims, we must interpret as ‘the characters traced in white chalk on the edges of the old billiard table’. And one of his early stories does start with the first sentence and end with the last: the narrator was playing charades with the guests at a party; one of the guests having mimed the title of a novel about Africa and about the letters of a white explorer captured by a local bandit, the narrator decides to give his answer by way of a cryptogram which he writes in chalk on the edge of the billiard table. But although Roussel claims that he used the same device, and the same pair of sentences, for Impressions d’Afrique, we need not believe him. We do find white people captured by an emperor who might be called, perhaps unjustly, an old bandit. But the letters have disappeared, and so has the whole of the second sentence. What Roussel has used is in fact another device, derived from the first.

The second, or extended, device is based on the systematic use of the pun. Although Roussel dropped the second sentence, he decided to use words associated with the word ‘billiards’, which had two different meanings, as in a pun. Thus the chalk used for billiard cues is stuck with glue to a piece of paper: but ‘colle’ (glue) also means, in school slang, detention: so, in the novel the emperor imposes a detention on one of the white men because he failed to recite the words of the national anthem. Roussel gives about fifty instances of such puns, which account for most of the episodes in Impression d’Afrique. In each case two semantically linked words are chosen; their meaning is transformed by punning, and two new words, or meanings, are produced, which have no semantic link. The tableau vivant, or the machine, and the fiction in the second part, are there to provide such a link. From a ‘natural’ (semantic) link one proceeds to an artificial (fictional) link. We now understand why the marksman chose for his target a soft-boiled egg: the calf of the leg is called in French ‘le gras du mollet’; ‘un oeuf mollet’ is a soft-boiled egg; and ‘Gras’ was the name of a gun used in the French army. Hence, in the first part, the champion marksman shooting at a soft-boiled egg with a Gras gun. In the second part, the narrative explains how he came into possession of a Gras gun, a model which was apparently obsolete. To take another instance: with a little luck one can sometimes see whales (‘baleines’) sporting themselves round an islet (‘îlot’). But ‘baleines’ also means the stays of a corset (which used to be made of whalebone), and by adding an ‘e’ to ‘îlot’ one obtains ‘ilote’, helot: hence the statue of a slave, made of stays. Also, in the classroom, a sluggard (‘un mou’) is often mocked (‘raillé’) by the other boys. But ‘mou de veau’ means ‘lights’, and ‘raille’ is pronounced like ‘rail’: so we find this incredible rail made of a pink sponge-like substance. And the narrative explains how such an object came to be built. We now understand the complexity and the apparently arbitrary character of the stories: they must establish a link between two words which are homophonic but have little or nothing in common in the world of reference.

Although Roussel gives many instances of the use of the second device, it appears that it did not permit him to diversify his fiction sufficiently: for the stories become more and more complicated, they seem to acquire a life of their own. Also, perhaps, simple punning is too static, fit for the individual scene rather than the whole narrative. So Roussel started using a third, or modified, device. It is also based on systematic punning. He takes a sentence, any sentence, for instance the first line of a French folk-song, ‘j’ai du bon tabac’ and divides the phonetic sequence into segments, so that other patterns, other words appear: in this case, the sequence of words ‘jade, tube, onde, aubade (‘onde’ means ‘wave’ or ‘water’). He is not the inventor of this device, often used in party games like picture puzzles and charades, and also in the type of verse called holorhyme verse (an extension to the whole line of the punning rhyme for which Thomas Hood is famous). The punning, instead of being confined to the word, concerns the whole sentence: it gives a series of words, again without referential links, and the fiction develops in order to provide those links. One can understand the admiration the Surrealists felt for Roussel: what we have just described is a typical Surrealist game, where the text is produced, almost mechanically, from a totally different subtext. Indeed, to produce stories with this device, Roussel used lines by Victor Hugo, some of his own lines, and the address of his bootmaker. Here the hermeticism of the text reaches its acme: the first device was obvious, and revealed at the first reading; the second device, although extremely difficult to puzzle out, was still public, since it was based on ambiguities existing in language; the third is completely private unless explicit clues are given (the pictures in a puzzle, the acting and setting in a charade), or unless the subtext is so well known as to be recognized by all. This is the case when the device is used to go from one language to another, in cases of ‘translation’ according to sound, the best-known instance of which is L. D. Van Rooten’s Mots d’Heures, Gousses, Rames. The lines are now famous; they correspond exactly to Roussel’s third device:

Un petit d’un petit

S’étonne aux Halles.

Un petit d’un petit

Ah! degrés te fallent ….

It is now time to assess Roussel’s attitude to language, to justify his inclusion in a corpus of délire: I shall try to show that in his work madness is linked with fiction in so far as both are experiences of language.

That Roussel’s fiction is preoccupied with language and its workings is obvious. His fascination in fact goes further. Language is no longer the medium, the transparent instrument of fiction, it is the source and the master of fiction. Fiction no longer uses language, it is merely a pretext for the unfolding of language. Take for instance the structure of Impressions d’Afrique: static scenes, their narrative explanation, and many years afterwards, in the essay, the key to their linguistic structure. The order is the same as in a textbook on language: first, a vocabulary, lists of words to be learnt; then, examples of grammar, sentences which give meaning to the words by presenting them in their context; and last the philological commentary, the grammarian’s metalinguistic explanations of the syntactic and semantic properties of the words and perhaps their e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The literature of délire
• 2 The linguistics of délire
• 3 The Philosophy of délire
• 4 The psychoanalysis of délire
• 5 Beyond délire
• Conclusion
• Index