Excising the Text: Narrative Ablation in Guilleragues' 'Lettres Portugaises.' (1997)

De tous les instants de ma vie, mon ami, je souffre, je vous aime, je vous attends. --Julie de Lespinasse (Lettre XXVI)(1) Tout episode de langage qui met en scene l'absence de l'objet aime--queues qu'en soient la cause et la duree . . . tend a transformer cette absence en epreuve d'abandon. --R. Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux(2) Ah! gardez vos conseils et vos craintes pour ces femmes a delire, et qui se disent a sentiment; dont l'imagination exaltee ferait croire que la nature a place leurs sens dans leur fete; qui, n'ayant jamais reflechi, confondent sans cesse l'amour et l'amant; qui, dans leur folle illusion, croient que celui-la seal avec qui elles ont cherche le plaisir, en est l'unique depositaire . . . Tremblez surtout pour ces femmes actives dans leur oisivete, que vous nommez sensibles, et dont l'amour s'empare si facilement et avec tant de puissance, qui sentent le besoin de s'en occuper encore, meme lorsqu'elles n'en jouissent pas; et s'abandonnant sans reserve a la fermentation de leurs idees, enfantent par elles ces lettres . . . si dangereuses a ecrire . . . --Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses(3) To de-mist the en-misted, sudsy spumescence of Ponge's Le Savon (Gallimard, 1967) is to subserve the very process of theoretical exposition; for such agential oxygenation breaks loose a horde of extractable premises, to wit, the contention that writing need be quintessentially posited: . . . non comme une transcription selon un code conventionnel de quelque idee (exterieure), mais a la verite comme un orgasme: comme l'orgasme d'un etre, ou disons d'une structure, deja conventionnelle par elle-meme, bien entendu--mais qui doit, pour s'accomplir, se donner, avec jubilation, comme telle: en un mot, se signifier elle-meme. (p. 127) So is literarity turned inward on itself. La Rochefoucauld's ersatz epithets erupt as poetics proper. Onanistic, the text is properly limned an objet de jouissance, an objoie, expression of its own contorted pleasure. Communication is undermined, truncated sequences ensconced beneath the text's grid, such that the very malicious foreplay that stimulates textual production--a rubbing, a chafing, an irritation (or frottage)--operates concomitantly to seduce the reader, to delight him (faire jouir le lecteur) while it parodies language and deploys verbal myths as basic units for its reconstruction, even for its replay. Quite patently, Ponge's spumose ontology of scriptural genesis, in all its headiness and however on the mark, succeeds an extensive lineage of barmy predecessors, in which the stroke of self, an almost auto-erotic, consumptive exertion of language, begets the text's propellant force. One might, in fact, cogently contend that the very alterity(4) of French neoclassical textuality--in all its heterogeneous demeanors--is subtended (structurally, poetically, semiotically, as it were) by an ever--present, enthymematic egocentricity, an essentially narcissistic displacement; that such self-appropriation is neither episodic nor intermittent, but rife and unremitting; that it does not merely minister to the celebrated antinomic pairings nor to the metaphoric distortions of the period, but is primordially and purposefully the very ministerial source: actualizer of dialectic detours and non-transmissibility, of encoded linguistic defeat. Moreover, such auto-atomization, while a perpetually conjectured facilitator of transparency, activates, rather iconoclastically, the very mechanisms of textual viscosity.(5) If, at the acme of the French Renaissance, Montaigne's moi subsists in an arena of unresolved indeterminacy, its code compelling its own respiteless vacillation, its own inveterate (semiotic) duplicity, there reverberates still in these literary cantons an all-encompassing, immutable poetics of selfhood. …