Antología de León Felipe

Irony and the "Order of Discourse" in Flaubert
Author(s): Rainer Warning and Michael Morton

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 13, No. 2, Narrative Analysis and Interpretation
(Winter, 1982), pp. 253-286
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468912
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Irony and the "Order of Discourse" in Flaubert
Rainer Warning
T HE AIM of the following essay is to show, through consideration

of Flaubert, constitutive principles of a type of narrative dis-
course to which modern theory of narrative opens itself only
hesitatingly. The reasons for that hesitation lie in the frames of ref-
erence chosen by this theory for its articulation; and with respect to
these it is necessary, here at the outset, to explain some concepts. When
Roland Barthes, in his programmatic "Introduction a l'analyse struc-
turale du recit,"' characterized narrative as a specific type of dis-
course, it is true that he meant a speech that transcends the individual
sentence; nonetheless, its theoretical frame of reference continues to
be defined linguistically as a linguistics of discourse homologous to
the linguistics of sentences. In terms of the Saussurean opposition of
"parole" and "langue," the theory of narrative discourse is conceived
as a narrative "langue," i.e., as a closed model of constitutive princi-
ples to be developed deductively, whereby the immanence postulate
of such a deduction leads in consistent fashion to the exclusion of
what Barthes himself calls the situation of the narrative, to the exclu-
sion of its social and cultural context: "Narration can indeed receive
its sense only from the world that uses it: beyond the narrative level
begins the world, that is, other systems (social, economic, ideological),
the terms of which are not only narratives [recits], but elements of a
substantially different nature (historical facts, resolutions, behaviors,
etc.)."2 Implicit in this formulation is a difficulty in his approach
which Barthes himself had obviously not considered. For to say that
the terms of contextual systems are not only narratives is also to say
that the terms of narrative itself always function simultaneously as
terms of contextual systems. Thus it seems impossible to keep the
objet-recit, that is, the object of the theory, separate from the situation
in which it has its place and function without running the risk that the
theory will prove inadequate. In Barthes's work and in that of his
successors the concept of function never advances beyond the sense in
which Vladimir Propp had already employed it in his analysis of the
0028-6087/82/130253-34$ 1.00/0
Copyright? 1982 by New Literary History, The University of Virginia
254 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
fairy tale: to refer exclusively to relationships imm

A basic insight of modern sociological functionalis
theory must be conceived as system/context theo
established in the study of narrative only hesitatin
structuralism of the sixties.
But how can one construct a theory of narration as situated dis-
course? The insufficiency of the binary opposition of parole and langue
had also created problems for linguistics itself, and the search for a
more adequate frame of reference led to general semiotics, with its
ternary opposition of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Semiotics
presupposes that the pragmatic relationship, that is, the relationship
of a system of signs to its users, also manifests recurrences and is
accordingly capable of theoretical description. The object of linguis-
tics becomes henceforth the parole as speech act, and discourses as
sequences of speech acts. Linguistics, however, has up till now not
succeeded in constructing a theory of such speech acts within the
framework of strictly deductive derivation from pragmatic universals,
and the obstacles to such attempts seem insuperable. For as soon as
one takes into account the constitutive presence in the parole not only
of the langue but also of nonlinguistic contextual systems-as soon,
that is, as this parole appears in its entire historical complexity and
historical power-every attempt at systematic deduction within the
framework of homogeneous model formation must again lead to
reductionism.
In any case, the literary scholar will hardly see in the sterile for-
malism of linguistic speech act analysis a way out of the difficulties
bequeathed by prepragmatic structuralism. To base this concept of
discourse on the sociology of knowledge, as attempted in particular by
Michel Foucault, appears by contrast far more fruitful.4 For Foucault,
a theory of discourse is conceived as a dialectic of freedom and con-
straints in speech, of discursive event and discursive order. By this
"order of discourse" are understood procedures by means of which
societally institutionalized speech is defended against the constantly
threatening contingency of a discursive "disorder." Foucault sees
three principal and in themselves differentiated strategies at work
here: first, the outward defense, through tabooing of the forbidden,
the irrational, and the untrue, whereby this claim to the truth (volonte
de verite) is purchased at the price of concealing the interests that stand
behind it; then, the inward defense, through repetition accompanied
by commentary, through establishment of ties to an author-auctoritas,
and through a "discipline" of rules and methods; finally, the defense
through mechanisms for restricting access to and control over dis-
course, such as ritualization, differentiation among communities of
IRONY AND THE "ORDER OF DISCOURSE" IN FLAUBERT 255
discourse within a given social formation, dogmaticization, and bar

riers to appropriation. Every discourse, whether characterized
conformity or opposition, stands in relation to such a discursive ord
The latter can destroy an existing discursive order only at the price
establishing itself as a new one.
Corresponding to this dialectic of discourse event and discursi
order is, on the level of analysis, a dialectic of discourse critique an
discourse genealogy. Critique analyzes the constraints exercised
the order, the repressions, the prohibitions and taboos; genealog
pursues the rise and historical development of discursive series owi
to or in spite of these constraints. If, however, it is fundamental t
every discourse that it manifests characteristics of the sort mention
above, this holds true as well for the critical and the genealogi
metadiscourse itself. Its locus of generality is not the point of depa
ture for a systematic deduction within the framework of homogen
ous model formation, but rather the result of historical description
How a particular discursive order is realized in fact is revealed only
the "archaeologist of knowledge" looking back on it. Only in the seri
of discourse events does he discern the identity of the underlyi
order, and t.he archaeologist himself is, in turn, bound to such
order. He does not operate outside of but rather within it; his d
scription is also a discourse event, the latent order of which always
becomes recognizable only in looking back on the series it itself he
to constitute.
It can be supposed that Foucault's outline of a theory of discourse

provides as well a frame of reference for narrative discourse in which
the problems of prepragmatic structural narrative research might be
resolved. Narrative discourse also has its "order," which one could
describe, in the terms of Yury Lotman's theory of narration (to which
we shall return), as a process in which the order of a surrounding
cultural discourse is shaken by means of the subject matter of the
narrative. And a discursive order is also to be postulated for that
ironic discourse that will be the concern of the following discussion.
Our thesis will be that this "order" of ironic discourse consists essen-
tially in the citation of reference discourses and that this act of citatio
is to be understood in light of an ambivalent relationship of distancin
and repetition, of critique and redemption, of deceptive illusion and
aesthetic resemblance. As something merely cited, the reference dis-
course is deprived of its own claim to truth; at the same time, how-
ever, it is "realized" anew-in the citation-and thereby redeemed
aesthetically. Its content remains, even when seen through, an object
of fascination; it speaks directly to the eccentric negativity of th
ironist who, in the citation, seeks to gain distance in order to sav
himself in that distance for the renewed "realization" of what is cited.

Ironic discourse thereby appears, however, in a perspective no longer
identical with that of the act of rhetorical irony, and I will begin with
the explication of that difference.
I. From Ironic Speech Act to Ironic Discourse
Irony has rarely been described as a specific type of discourse. In

general, theories of irony either remain within the framework estab-
lished by classical rhetoric, or they are part of a larger philosophy of
irony that loses sight of the concrete composition of ironic discourse.
Yet precisely this ironic discourse is suited to mediate between the
indispensable foundation of ironic speech in rhetoric and the no less
indispensable insights of the philosophy of irony. Its theoretical de-
scription requires the one as well as the other.
Classical rhetoric subsumes ironia under the tropes and seeks ac-
cordingly to describe it as verborum immutatio. In this view, irony is the
expression of a thing through its opposite, its contrarium. Within the
tropes, however, irony assumes a special position. That is, in contrast
to metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, periphrasis, and so forth, ironia
is not lexically determined. The "contrary expression," the contrarium,
is rather a situated citation of a feature of the opponent's identity.
When Marc Antony says, "Brutus is an honorable man," "honorable"
is an ironic contrarium, but it functions as such only in this particular
rhetorical constellation. This special status of ironia explains the (at
first glance perplexing) fact that in connection with this trope the
rhetoricians raise the additional question of how it can properly be
understood as a trope at all. A lexically determined trope does not
require such reflection. Ironia, however, compels it. According to
Quintilian, the fact that what is said is the opposite of what is meant,
that there is indeed a tropic improprietas at hand, follows either from a
pronunciation that arouses attention or from the person of the
speaker or from the state of affairs discussed. If any of these factors
contradicts what is said, then the discrepancy between what is said and
what is meant becomes manifest.5
Quintilian's references make clear that classical rhetoric was alread
acquainted with the phenomenon, though of course not with th
concept, of what are today termed irony signals. The concept come
from Harald Weinrich. Irony signals, he says, are signs that obey a
code and that are addressed not to the object of irony but rather t
third person present at the ironic speech act either in fact or at least by
implication. Thus Weinrich proposes to expand the basic commun
cation model of speaker and hearer by adding to it a third perso

in this way to develop a basic model of irony: "Linguistic comm
tions of this sort proceed in two different directions. They bran
so to speak; one chain of information goes to the hearer overtl
dressed and affirms, while a second, accompanying chain of inf
tion goes to a third person-implicitly addressed-and negates
latter chain of information is composed of irony signals. Their c
a secret code of those in the know and who share the sentiments of the
speaker."6 But what sort of signs constitute this secret code? Weinrich
goes on: "A wink, a clearing of the throat, an emphatic voice, a special
intonation, an accumulation of bombastic expressions, bold
metaphors, overlong sentences, word repetitions, or-in printed
texts-italics and quotation marks. These are all signals, that is, signs.
For the most part they are linguistic signs: words, sounds, or prosodic
peculiarities."7
I have cited the entire catalogue because it is very revealing. On the
one hand there can be no doubt that it lists signals that can indicate
irony. On the other hand, however, it makes clear that these signals
do not obey any code, not even a secret code of "those in the know and
who share the sentiments of the speaker." Winking and clearing one's
throat can signal any number of things, among them irony. Whether
the latter is the case depends not on the signal but rather on the
situational context in which the speech act occurs. Hyperbole in its
myriad forms can, among many other things, also signal irony.
Whether, however, emphatic praise is sincere or ironic can be de-
cided, again, only on the basis of prior knowledge of the value stan-
dards of the speaker, which the speaker in turn presupposes as the
hearer's overall frame of expectations. Thus it can be presumed that
irony signals function as such only in a particular speech act. They are
localized on the parole level, not on the langue level. They owe their
identifiability not to the linguistic code but rather to prior pragmatic
knowledge. Their successful identification occurs above all on the
basis of presuppositions that are present in advance of the speech act
and without which the speech act cannot be understood as ironic by
the hearer. Weinrich's notion of a secret code points de facto in pre-
cisely this direction, and it seems to me that behind what he develops
as a specific model of irony there is concealed a particular pragmatic
instantiation of the basic communication model with its components
of speaker, hearer, and object. If one takes Weinrich's "third person"
as the second, that is, as the hearer, as the person addressed whose
understanding allows the act of irony to succeed, then the "second
person" shifts via metonymic correlates into the role of the object of
irony, into the role of an "object-person." The speaker pretends to
assume the argumentation of this object-person (th

of "honorable Brutus"); there arises fictitious estab
idarity, a simulatio or, as Quintilian says, an illusio
hearer is intended to see through and recognize for
then, in this recognition, to unite with the speaker
person:8
OBJECT-PERSON
simulation disruption
of solidarity of solidarity
SPEAKER establishment HEARER

of solidarity
The greater the mutual familiarity of speaker and hearer with the
presuppositions involved in the act of irony, the lower the signal
threshold can be held. The extreme case is that in which the situa-
tional context almost automatically signals what is said as ironic
Quintilian obviously has such "automatic signals"9 in mind when he
speaks of an implicit denial, through persona or rei natura, of what
said. The speaker places himself in contradiction to what the hearer
expects from him, or he constitutes with the trope a momentary con
tradiction to the case advocated, to the causa itself. And by the sam
token, irony must be signaled all the more explicitly (Lausberg's "art
ficial signals") the less familiar the person addressed is with the pr
suppositions made by the speaker. The fact that in presenting t
triad pronuntiatio, persona, and rei natura Quintilian mentions first o
all the attention-arousing pronuntiatio appears to indicate his supposi
tion that even in the case of forensic irony an explicit signaling will
most cases be required. The concept of the irony signal is thus
pragmatic concept. Its logical structure is that of a multitermed pred
ication, that is, a predication that can be carried out only under th
situational conditions of the particular speech act. Irony signals are
accordingly not describable linguistically. They attain the character o
signs only within the framework of an interpretation specific to a
particular communication act, an interpretation which presupposes
turn pragmatic knowledge in the form of a familiarity with the iron
cally suspended value system of the speaker. This knowledge, which
must be supplied by the hearer, preserves the identity of the momen
tarily disturbed speech situation. Thus the subject of repragmaticiza
tion proves to be not the speaker but rather the hearer. By stabilizin
the pragmatic context disturbed by the speaker, the hearer is place
in the position of being the one who lets the act of irony succeed at a
To call upon the hearer to accomplish this task, however, means at th
same time to credit him with the ability to do so. Such confidence
flatters his intellectual abilities, and the effect striven for by the
speaker-the winning of the hearer to solidarity against the object of
aggression-rests on this flattery.
Basically then, this ironic complicity between speaker and hearer
takes place on the pragmatic rather than the semantic or syntactic
level: in the successful identification of the ironic negation and not in
the identification of the position from which that negation is pro-
nounced. Even when this position is relatively easy to make out-i.e.,
when the contrarium is describable as antinomy (a vs. b) and not as
logical negation (a vs. not-a)-such an act of semantic inversion re-
mains nonetheless an analytic act from which the irony itself tends to
divert the hearer's attention. Its focus is on the thing simulated and
thereby on a feature of the opponent's identity. It is accomplished in
the negation of that identity, and it achieves its whole impact from the
fact that it does not burden this negation with an articulation of its
own position. Simulatio of the opposing position and dissimulatio of
one's own unite in this way to achieve the perlocutionary effect of the
act of irony. The ironist does not measure the opposing position
against his own but rather severs it from all relationships in order,
having thus isolated it, to annihilate it.
It follows from what has been said that, within the framework of
rhetorical persuasion, there are limits to how far such withdrawal of
one's own identity can be taken. In the competitive constellation of
political or legal struggles, one can't risk the hearer's being unable to
see through the irony to the causa itself. This sight is guaranteed by
the insular character of the trope, that is, of the nonliteral speech,
within the literal speech that surrounds it. The context of the impro-
prietas is stable: "Omnia circa fere recta sunt" (9. 2. 45), says Quintilian.
It is this stable context that allows the position of the speaker to be
recognized and thereby permits the momentary abandonment of that
position in the act of irony itself. To be sure, besides the trope or
isolated figure of speech, classical rhetoric also knew irony as a figure
of thought; here, as once again Quintilian formulates it, it is no longer
a matter of a contrast between literal and nonliteral use of words
("verba sint verbis diversa," 9. 2. 46), but rather of the complete d
pearance of the position of the speaker in a continuous dissimulat
which, beyond the individual causa, can in extreme cases place
stamp on an entire life, as the example of Socrates teaches: "A ma
whole life may be colored with irony, as was the case with Socrat
(9. 2. 46). This reference to the ironist Socrates must of course not
lead us to overlook the fact that the examples of the figure of thought
that Quintilian gives in this passage do not transcend the limits of the
sentence. In view of the constraints of the rhetorical

even as figure of thought, remains insular. It remain
taking the step from speech act to discourse. That st
ble only when, as in fiction, the competitive constrain
cal situation fall away. Only fiction makes possibl
ironic sermocinatio; only fiction makes possible thefictio
only fiction makes possible ironic discourse.
Fictional discourse is specifically excluded from t
world of activity, that is, from the continuity of sequ
In view of this exclusion scholars have spoken of the
tiness, the situational abstractness, indeed the unsituat
tional speech and thus of its lack of consequences.
this way, fictional discourse appears in opposition
"pragmatic" discourse. This sort of definition seems,
unfortunate and misleading, for it employs an unc
pragmatics and thereby avoids dealing with the specif
fictional discourse. For fictional speech, of course, als
ic dimension. To be sure, the speech situation in fict
been detached from immediate determination by a s
however, this situation of use does not, of course,
simply irrelevant. What we see here is rather a situa
that an internal speech situation is opposed to an ext
situation.10 In this circumstance the internal spee
interior pragmatics, can compensate for what the ex
situation lacks. In the case of narrative discourse the so-called narra-
tive situation typically effects such a compensation. The figure of th
narrator becomes the center of orientation, the one who, by inter-
preting the world represented in the text, consolidates it and in th
form mediates it to the reader-with or without introduction of a
fictional reader as proxy for the real one. This interpretation
consist in the fact that, from the standpoint of an articulated posi
the narrated world or elements of that world are regarded ironic
The narrative situation reproduces in such cases the rhetori
strategy of the establishment of solidarity with the victim of ir
Such ironic functioning of the authorial narrative situation ca
seen in "classic" authors from Fielding to Balzac. Of course this i
yet afictio totius voluntatis. The latter presupposes rather that the
rator be diminished as a center of orientation, that his personal id
tity be subsumed into an impersonal narrative voice which hencef
articulates itself on the surface of the text only through acts of ir
negation. In this we see an explanation of the affinity of ironic
course to Wayne C. Booth's "unreliable narrator,"11 or, on the ot
hand, to impersonal narration (narration seemingly without a
rator), that is, to what F. K. Stanzel calls the figural narrative

tion.12 Here too one could think of"classic" authors as example
the first that spring to mind are, significantly enough, mast
irony: Voltaire, Thomas Mann, and, above all, Flaubert.
However, even the purest form of impersonal narration can s
compensated for within the narrative itself through the n
story. It is well known that this story is not something given in ad
to the narrative but rather a constitutive level of narration itse
indeed, for narrative discourse, the decisive one.13 No story,
rative. In other words, to the extent that the story becomes pro
ic, the narrative risks its identity as narrative. But this very ri
to the chance for ironic narration. What in the theory of iro
sometimes been termed "event irony" or "situational irony" is
on the level of the story, an ironic negation of the narrative in
tion expected of it. Here again, a contrast between, for ex
Fielding and Voltaire is instructive: in the case of the form
thoroughly constructed plot, even without the level of au
commentary, provides a sufficiently transparent modeling
latter, a paradigmatic series of events with the concluding iron
of precisely the theme provides what that paradigm sought to
It is a mark of Flaubert's historical position to have combin
withdrawal of the narrator into an ironic subjectivity with an
reduction of the narrated subject matter that in its radicality
predecessors, though it certainly has found successors in the
tion of the twentieth century.
Let us summarize our observations thus far. The ironicfictio
voluntatis is made possible only by fiction; the realization of th
bility means that the underdetermined external reception situ
no longer compensated for by determinants of the interna
situation. The interior pragmatics do not stabilize the unde
mined external pragmatics but rather radicalize it to the point
identification of irony as irony can become problematic. In th
nection we must return again to the question of irony signals
play with the speech situation can succeed only when that situa
essentially stable, i.e., when it can be presupposed that the val
tems of the speaker involved in the act of irony are known. To
even the most extravagant praise functions as an irony sign
under the presupposition of a basic familiarity of the hearer w
value system of the speaker. In rhetorical irony this famili
ensured, through the context of the speech and positive artic
of the causa, to a degree that the insular ironic negation can b
barked upon without risk. But what if these islands of ironic n
expand so that they wipe out the areas between and in this way
into a pragmatically foundedfictio totius voluntatis, that is, one fou

in the narrative situation itself? What if, that is, the directed n
of the ironic speech act passes into the continuous negativity of
discourse? To the extent that the voluntas of the speaker avoid
tive determination, the reader finds difficulty in identifying
signals as such. That identification becomes henceforth an
task, which can be accomplished only in the framework of a l
process, of a specific formation of experience.
The basic principle of every formation of experience is the p
ple of recurrence. Semiotic experience, that is, the learning of s
formed, according to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, throu
recurrence of psychological contexts that are connected by me
particular stimuli with external contexts.'4 The recurrence of
"stimulus situations" leads to the possibility of interpreti
stimulus as a sign for the situation in question; in this w
"stimulus situation" becomes a "sign situation." This basic m
the constitution of signs may be helpful in the present case as
fictional discourse is to enable its reader to interpret certain st
irony signals, then it must permit him to realize on the basis of
structure that which, in the case of rhetorical irony, is the pre
tion of success: formation of experience on the basis of rec
contexts. Here the most various procedures are conceivable.
the recurrences are striking and frequent, the signal threshold
held so low that the reader gains access to the irony relatively
(which does not preclude increasing difficulties in identification
subsequent course of the text). It is equally possible, howev
irony to insinuate itself, to shake by degrees the reader's cert
and, through the effect of retroactive connections and associati
move him to reexamine what has already been read so that
quate reception becomes possible only at a second reading.
case, interpretation is limited by the closed character of a unive
discourse from which the narrator, in the capacity of someone
the reader could question in order to resolve his uncertain
withdrawn. Thus all suspicion of irony, no matter how great th
ability, must remain ultimately unconfirmed, because such confirm
could come only from an articulated position. That the aut
prepared to accept this risk inherent in thefictio totius voluntat
supposes that ironic discourse is no longer governed by the term
rhetorical strategy of establishment of solidarity with the victim o
In the case of an irony that risks its own adequate reception, it
longer be a matter, or at least not primarily, of a strategy of ex
The ironist's fictitious establishment of solidarity with his vict
comes functionally ambivalent; that which is excluded, distanc

gated on the level of the thing represented is, through the repr
tion, recovered, held fast, affirmed. Such affirmation can be a m
simply of pure delight in simulatio; it can, however, go further and
in as well the thing represented itself. Under the surface of iro
gation there can be concealed an actually dialogic relationship o
ironist and his object, or indeed a real establishment of solidarit
that object resulting in the reader being manipulated into the p
of victim. In any case the model of establishment of solidarity
dered dynamic in a way that no longer allows the reader to ap
the addressee of rhetorical persuasion. The simulatio of the vict
comes a test for the reader, for his textual sensibility, for his
gence. The intelligence of the reader is the complement to the
rificium intellectus of the ironist.
Thus here too it is finally a matter of complicity, of establishm
solidarity. This establishment of solidarity, however, is less a st
against the object of irony than a strategy of exclusion of the
who proves unequal to the "discipline" of ironic discourse
kegaard described this establishment of solidarity by means of
sion as the "inconsistency, which irony has in common with
negative standpoint, of seeking to found a community on the b
something whose concept is that of isolation." Irony is elitist, a
for "fellow-conspirators" who isolate themselves from the "un
ated." There is about it "a certain distinguished bearing, which
from the fact that, although understood, it does not actually wi
understood, and the effect of that bearing is that this figure of
looks down, so to speak, on the plain and simple speech that eve
can understand without difficulty; it rides, so to speak, in the
coach of its incognito, and looks down from this sublime posit
the common speech proceeding on foot."15
Kierkegaard's ironic description of this state of affairs calls
tion to his own distorted relationship to irony. Irony is for him
tially annihilation and only annihilation. The formulation statin
"in irony, the subject wants always to get out of its object"16
sponds fully to the definition, taken over from Hegel, of iron
"infinite absolute negativity";'7 and it suppresses-along
Hegel-the possibility that even the object that has been seen t
can remain significant for the ironic subject, significant, of cou
longer as philosophical truth but rather as an object of aestheti
nation. Wherever aesthetic semblance is comprehended as th
sual appearing of the idea,"'8 the ironic semblance, the spec
ironic illusio, will inevitably be found too frivolous; here irony
be justified aesthetically but rather only epistemologically, an
means with regard exclusively to its power to neg

Accordingly, when Kierkegaard says that for the
has no reality,"19 he is negating the aesthetic sembl
name of a concept of "contemplation" put for
theological purpose: to be sure, the ironist may se
ances; to be sure, he is in a certain sense prophetic
and situation remain "the opposite of the prophet
devouring gaze looks only backward and is unab
aspect of negativity that which is yet to come. Iron
sense alone: as Socratic irony, as destruction of me
sake of a Being [Sein] that nonetheless "lies be
back."20
In the following we will attempt to establish, ag
one-sided and in the end religiously motivated dete
in terms of negativity, the validity of the aesthetic
semblance; in concluding these preliminary reflect
necessary to inquire into those historical conditions
favorable to the formation of "communities of iron
what we have seen thus far, it can be presumed th
discourse, ironic discourse surely has flourished in
marked historical periods. As an essentially axio
termined discourse, it presupposes a public th
exclude itself from dominant value systems or th
toward such self-exclusion. And here it is again Kie
great acumen recognized situations of historical up
change as formations conducive to irony and who
sought to demonstrate the ultimately undialec
Hegel's critique of irony. To be sure, says Kierk
rectly interprets Romantic irony, so far as it "neg
historical reality in order to make room for a self-c
fails, however, to recognize the true irony-what K
calls Socratic irony-which does not pass sentenc
rather on a particular historical reality, and thereb
torical reality the negative moment in the system
the negative moment in the system is, in historic
historical reality, the negative moment is there, a
never is."22
Here again, of course, the historical existence of
prehended positively, i.e., as aesthetic semblanc
sidedly as the existence of the negative, and the co
has, correspondingly, historical-theological implic
kegaard's identification of epochs conducive to iro
however, unaffected by this. Irony has its historic
of transition between the old that has already passed on and the new
that cannot yet be made out; and thus it is certainly no accident, but
rather an implicit statement about the situation of ironic discourse
generally, that the author who at the beginning of the modern age
realized this discourse in its purest form conceived of his own time as
an epoch of historical upheaval and change: "I see," writes Flaubert in
1850 to his friend Louis Bouilhet, "a past in ruins and a future in
germination; the one is too old, the other too young. Everything is
confused."23
II. Flaubert
A. The Citing Subject of Narration
Narrative situations are first of all purely descriptive catego

which do not yet say anything about their respective function
holds as well for what Stanzel calls the figural narrative situatio
is, for the type of impersonal narration that, beginning in the
half of the nineteenth century, became a dominant mode of nar
of the modern period and that Flaubert is the first to con
theoretically, in terms of the notion of impersonnalite. With ref
to Flaubert's successor Henry James, Percy Lubbock has interp
this mode of narration normatively under the aspect of the opp
"showing" vs. "telling." He maintains that "the art of fiction d
begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be sho
be so exhibited that it will tell itself."24 This normative interpr
cuts off any further question as to its particular function: impe
narration completes the illusion of reality; the illusion of reality
goal of all narration. If we inquire into Flaubert's imperson
against the background of this decision, we note that, while Flau
certainly intent on achieving illusion, the function of this illu
determined in accordance with Quintilian's definition of illusio in
irony. Moreover, as we shall see, this function of irony amounts to an
ironic canceling of the traditional function of narration. Flaubert's
ironic illusio does not complete the realistic illusion referentielle but
rather becomes the instrument of its dissolution.
On the basis of the discussion in part one, it is easy to show how an
ironic illusio can be derived from the figural narrative situation. For
the ironically self-effacing spectacle requires on the one hand that the
narrator conceal his personal identity and withdraw into imperson-
ality, and on the other that the role he plays and presents to the reader
serves as a substitute center of orientation. This is the role of the
central locus of perspective, the figural mediu

character. Corresponding to the elimination of the
an apparent establishment of solidarity on the par
who has disappeared from the surface of the t
anonymous speaker, is identical with the implicit
reflector-character. Thus we find once again an in
schema of rhetorical establishment of solidarity-n
a variation that changes everything: the position on
the irony is constructed remains unarticulated thr
personality of the narrator is a form of ironic diss
position; narration from the perspective of the m
ironic simulatio of this perspective; and in the inter
elements narrative discourse makes possible that w
yond the scope of the act of rhetorical irony: aficti
In light of this it becomes at the same time possi
self-effacing narrator is signaled as such. In order
perspective must be repeatedly marked anew; and
constraint of continual renewal of the marking of t
situation to construct the recurrence of contex
reader to achieve retroactively a specific formation
makes possible the interpretation of certain stimu
The spectrum of markings by which perspective i
trum of Flaubert's signaling of irony. This fixing
always most apparent where the figural medium
and where its manner of viewing and speaking is
tionally by means of cliches. As opposed to this, th
tive is least apparent where the narration is appar
the perspectival structure is disclosed only through
roactive connections and associations.
Examples of the former case are known to all-for instance, th
sixth chapter of Madame Bovary, the reading chapter, which, throug
amassing of cliches and in part through authorial comment, reveals
Emma's romanticizing way of viewing things as a false semanticizatio
of reality and thereby immediately undercuts the figural medium
center of orientation. Such cases of ostensive dissociation, however,
merely establish the framework within which another, much more
subtly signaled irony operates. Here ostensive dissociation is replaced
by ostensive establishment of solidarity with the medium, with the
result that it is henceforth necessary to apprehend the simulation
against this establishment of solidarity and the distance against the
simulated identification. The reader finds himself exposed to the
sophistication of a play with language that consists essentially in ren-
dering ambiguous the association of the statement (enonce) with its
subject (sujet de 1'enonciation). For there are always two subjec

volved in the figural narrative situation, the hidden narrator
figural medium, whereby the latter can function both as a loc
perspective and as an additional sujet de l'enonciation dependent
superordinate narrator. Every narrative enonce is thereby const
through a double subject reference, and Flaubert's irony co
largely in an exploitation of the difficulties in identification t
presented. If there is such a thing as a deep structure of his ir
then it is this functionalization of the figural narrative situat
terms of a systematic obfuscation of the subject reference
illustrate this through consideration of his use of narrated mon
(discours indirect libre).
The usual definition of narrated monologue-according to
content and tone refer to the speech of a figure, formal criter
as tenses and personal pronouns to that of the superor
narrator-does, to be sure, make clear in a general way the suit
of this type of speech for perspectival narration. It does not, h
capture what is for Flaubert the decisive point because he fuse
subjects of speech involved in the discours indirect libre in such
that the criteria mentioned no longer obtain and the nar
monologue appears in the guise of standard narrator spee
abolishing the relevant criteria of identity, the narrator assum
speech of the figure to such an extent that there remains onl
presence of a fictive speech situation to signal the narr
monologue as such and thereby also the ironic distance of the
narrator. Let us take as our example the mirror scene in M
Bovary:
But in noticing herself in the mirror she was astonished at her face. Never
had she had eyes so large, so black, nor of such depth. Something subtle, with
which her person was suffused, was transfiguring her.
She repeated to herself: "I have a lover! a lover!" reveling in this idea as if it
were a second puberty she were experiencing. So she was at last going to
possess those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired.
She was entering into something marvelous, where all was passion, ecstasy,
delirium; a bluish immensity surrounded her, the summits of feeling sparkled
beneath her thought, and ordinary existence appeared but in the distance,
deep in the shadow between those heights.25
The simulation strategy seen here works in the following way: first, a
standard narrator speech is suggested; this is then successively dis-
closed as narrated monologue; and in the end it retroactively absorbs
the beginning into that perspective. The effort Flaubert expended to
render the semantics of the "transfiguration" pragmatically ambiguous
is apparent from the Scenarios, where the first paragr

cited runs as follows:
Meanwhile she noticed herself in the mirror, and she was almost stupefied as
she recognized her face. How did it express nothing of what filled her soul?
How was it that she could appear the same? Then she drew nearer to examine
herself, and suddenly she found herself extraordinarily beautiful. She had
never had eyes so large, so black, nor of such depth. Her brow shone, her
teeth were whiter. She admired herself at length as she undid her dress; she
batted her eyelashes and arched her waist, affecting artlessly the attitude of
courtesan and empress.26
The pragmatic relationships are here so unambiguous that there is no

difficulty in identifying the narrated monologue. In the final version,
on the other hand, everything that would make this reading certain has
been deliberately eliminated. There remains only the situation of
internal speech ("in noticing herself... she was astonished") to point
to Emma as primary subject of speech and thereby to awaken the
suspicion of irony, which is not confirmed until the following para-
graph with its now unambiguous narrated monologue. However, this
irony, which also absorbs retroactively the transfiguration, no longer
permits an unambiguously perspectival interpretation of the latter. If
the fictive speech situation stands as an irony signal against the ap-
parently standard narrator speech, the latter stands by the same token
against the irony signal.
This consciously and carefully constructed perspectival indetermi-
nacy prohibits an interpretation of such passages as nothing more
than an especially sophisticated masking technique. Rather, they
make clear how little Flaubert's ironic discourse is a matter of estab-
lishing the reader's solidarity against an object-person and how far
this discourse is removed from the persuasion strategy of the act of
rhetorical irony. His ironic discourse is realized insofar as it tran-
scends the status of ironic negation and moves in the direction of an
irony of irony that makes distancing and dialogicity indistinguishable;
indeed, distance makes dialogicity possible.27 This double movement
is based on ironic citation, and in our example takes the form of an
accumulation of Romantic cliches reminiscent, in particular, of
Chateaubriand. On the level of ironic negation Emma's transfigura-
tion is interpreted as pathological, destructive self-infatuation, as
narcissism. The claim to truth of the discourse on which this illusory
transfiguration rests is thereby negated. Romantic speech supposes
itself to be immediately "significant." It is the culmination of what
Foucault calls the "ancient elision of the reality of discourse," the
culmination of a tendency, which has characterized the Western epis-
teme since Plato, to conceal the societally and institutionally med

character of all speech through an appeal to the "founding subj
(sujetfondateur) and its "native experience" (experience originaire)
Romantic genius may suffer from his distance from society; h
ment, however, is untouched by this isolation. Language rem
available to him; indeed, there is so little question of its availab
that he is able to articulate his melancholy in the form of a be
lament and, in this beauty, to enjoy it. In his study of Chateaub
J. P. Richard has coined for this compensatory relationship of co
level and expression level the excellent formulation "optimism
signifier," and has thereby designated the background against w
one must see what Flaubert renders thematic: he confronts the
timism of unmediated speech with the pessimism of the cliche.29
being cited is an indication that the claim to naturalness of speec
means of which the ironic subject formerly sought to form hi
personal identity, has been seen through.
The citing subject's own history, however, continues to bind h
that same speech; hence the citation of a cliche also continu
sentimental dialogue with that earlier illusory identity, an attem
redeem aesthetically what has proven unfit for life in the real wo
is only in light of this ambivalence between discourse critiq
aesthetic redemption, only when one attends to the quality o
thetic fascination in the cliche, that it becomes possible to under
the exuberant use of cliches that characterizes Flaubert's ironic dis-
course in, for example, the mirror scene. In articulating Emma's dif-
fuse feelings in the form of a sublime phrase imitatif, the narrator
abandons himself to the euphoria of the Romantic discourse cited in
the cliche--in front of the mirror, of course. While Emma herself
remains-in a situation corresponding entirely to Lacan's analysis of
the "mirror stage"30-caught in the idea of the representation and
thus supposes that she sees the image of her own essence, the nar-
rator, articulating Emma's thoughts and feelings, knows his discourse
to be an imaginary one, constituted in the mirror of Romanticism.
There is on the level of representation a reflected dissociation-
corresponding to the pathological split represented in the self-
between a sujet de l'enonciation, which merely cites Romantic discourse,
and a sujet de l'enonce, which role is delegated to Emma and which she
continues to enact. The irony of the narrated monologue, which is
pushed to the point that the subject reference becomes undecidable, is
not simply a sophisticated establishment of apparent solidarity; it
manifests an actual proximity of both subjects. If the narrator only
attains the identity of an ironically free subject by distancing himself
from his creation, that identity remains nonetheless borrowed from
the discourse of the figure; and in this sense the

vary, c'est moi" has its validity, whether it is authe
lives Romantic discourse in a pathological illusion
die. Flaubert deactualizes that discourse into ironic illusio and can live.
Thus to see in the cliche purely an exposure of something would be
to miss an essential aspect of it. Cliches signal the citability of a dis-
course, the fact that the citing subject is an eccentric one with respect
to that discourse: the subject is no longer, but certainly once was,
dominated by the claim to truth of that discourse. It is not an oppo-
nent that is simulated but rather an alter ego of the ironic subject
himself; the competitive aspect of rhetorical persuasion has yielded to
an immanent dialogicity of citing and cited voice which tests the
reader, courts him, and seeks to draw him into its movement. Citation
of cliches presupposes a break in identity in the history of the ironic
subject, a break in identity that in turn reflects a situation of funda-
mental historical change. There is present in the cliche citation the
truth of irony, its historical truth in the sense of Kierkegaard's remark
that irony corresponds to the negative moment in the system.
In 1852, Flaubert writes to Louise Colet:
I have just read four volumes of the Memoires d'outre-tombe. It excels its reputa-
tion. No one has been impartial respecting Chateaubriand; all parties have
had a grudge against him. A fine critique could be done on his works. What a
man he would have been without his poetics! How it cramped him! What lies
and pettiness! In Goethe he sees only Werther, which is only one small corner
of that immense genius. Chateaubriand is like Voltaire. They did (artistically)
everything they could to spoil the most admirable faculties that the Good
Lord had given them. Without Racine, Voltaire would have been a great poet,
and without Fenelon, what would the man have done who wrote Velleda and
Rene! Napoleon was like them: without Louis XIV, without that phantom of
monarchy that obsessed him, we would not have had the galvanizing of a
society that was already a cadaver. What makes the figures of antiquity so
beautiful to behold is that they were originals: everything is there, stemming
from itself. Now how much study is it necessary to pass through in order to
free oneself from books, and what an enormous amount must be read! One
has to drink the oceans and piss them out again.32
The passage is revealing for its disclosure of a cast of mind that would
still like to hold fast to the Romantic ideal of originality, but that sees
at the same time how all originality (excepting only that of earliest
antiquity) is in the end revealed as a repetition of what has already
been said. Now, on the other hand, it is necessary to read in order to
liberate oneself from books-supposedly to liberate-for the ironic
"pissing out again" is a form of repetition, of return. Drinking and
eliminating-the aggressiveness of the metaphors betrays a state of
affairs that still presents itself to reflection as a puzzle defying

tion, while praxis has already established itself in a new constr
imagination. For if the possibility of being cited lays bare Rom
speech as that discursive order that it purports not to be, iron
tance nonetheless makes possible at the same time a new relati
this discourse, which never lost its secret fascination for Flauber
the entire nineteenth century. It was, after all, this discourse
provided the metaphysical compensation for the existential ex
ence of failure and that assimilated this experience into the pa
of meaning of an overarching cosmic order. And if, from M
Bovary on, this discourse recurs only in ironic citation, if Rom
melancholy is confronted with real suffering and judged accord
this ironic aggression is nonetheless a strategy of redemption
permits a reactualization of Romanticism under altered cond
indeed perhaps for the first time its appropriate realization: n
that referential illusion that plunges Emma into disaster but ra
ironic illusio.
The possibility of citation presupposes distance, eccentricity. Such

eccentricity, however, characterizes Flaubert's attitude not only to
Romantic discourse but also to all the other discourses with which he
establishes the background of his ironic negativity, in order then to
thematize them as cited discourses in his ironic universe of discourse.
Thus essentially the same thing is true of his treatment of bourgeois
discourse as was the case with Romantic discourse. Citation of dis-
course is here, again, first of all discourse critique through reduct
to cliche. If in the case of Romantic discourse it was a matter of
reducing the claim to naturalness of this speech to its disavowed
cursive order, so in the case of bourgeois-conformist discourse i
matter of laying bare its constraints and restrictions, its mechan
for securing itself, its disciplining of dangerous speech, and its t
ing of forbidden speech.
The festive speeches at the agricultural fair in Yonville spread
ideological euphoria of the "one big family"; from the eccentric
tion of the narrator, however, they appear as a petrified ord
which every discursive contingency is eliminated and which the
reflects most exactly the social order that is celebrated in
speeches. None of those present, including the speakers, are a
that this truth is mere ideology, that every "true discourse" is p
chased at the price of concealing an interested "claim to truth";3
narrator alone is conscious of this: "The meeting was over; the c
dispersed; and now that the speeches had been read, everyon
sumed his rank and everything returned to normal: the masters
treated the servants, and the latter beat the animals, sluggish tr
phants, who returned again to the stable, a green c

horns" (p. 155). The euphoria of the holiday flows
ity, the speeches reappear-metonymically as we
ly-in the wreaths of the cattle; they are dumb be
festations of collective stupidity (betise), but this s
That is also true of Homais, who provides the bou
discourse with the components of secularism a
science. Through the example of his "enlightene
reveals the exclusion mechanism that Foucault has termed the
"separation of madness" (partage de la folie).34 It is not the
Bournisien that is dangerous to him; with him Homais en
in disputations in which his enlightened reason enjoys a se
triumphs. It is the grotesque figure of the blind beggar t
dangerous to him. It is against the beggar that he mounts h
mately successful campaign in the Fanal de Rouen. The campaig
in confinement, in the "perpetual isolation" (p. 351) of the
cuted, as the final act of exclusion that reason must execute in order
to triumph in its betise.
At the same time, however, betise is the point at which critique turns
into fascination. The aggressiveness of his denunciation of pretended
truth suggests the extent to which the ironist Flaubert is still affected
by this claim to truth, which is just as much a part of his biography as
is the claim of Romantic discourse. Jean-Paul Sartre has shown how
frequently bourgeois cliches creep into Flaubert's correspondence;
and from this he has inferred-somewhat triumphantly-Flaubert's
own bourgeois nature: "In fact Flaubert does not express himself like
the bourgeois; he speaks the language of the bourgeoisie because he is
bourgeois."35 Certainly there can be no doubt as to his membership in
the bourgeoisie. Ideologically, however, Flaubert distances himself
from this class to the degree that he discovers the cliche in his own
discourse and that of his peers. It seems to me that Sartre fails to
recognize that such a discovery can be accomplished only in and
through the phases of one's own discursive socialization. Only the
discovery that the nature of one's being has been shaped by the cliche
can lead to a self-conscious search. If the repetition in the citation is an
act of liberation, it remains nonetheless a form of reassociation of the
ironic subject with that part of his biography without which he could
not have found his own ironic identity, inasmuch as the latter is ar-
ticulated in the negation of the former. The disturbing thing about a
figure like Homais is not his stupidity but rather the intelligence of his
enlightened rational discourse, which contributed to Flaubert's own
development no less than did Romantic discourse. Comparisons with
the first version show the extent to which this figure is not only ex-
posed by means of cliches but is also, at the same time, the occas
for euphoric cliche elaboration, which in the final version had to
reduced.36
We cannot here extend the findings indicated thus far to the other
discourses through citation of which Flaubert's ironic universe of
discourse is constituted: revolutionary discourse in the Education sen-
timentale, religious discourse in the guise of the Tanit cult in Salammbo,
scientific discourse in Bouvard et Pecuchet. In all these cases of ironic
simulation, the extent to which the ironic subject is still affected by the
discourse in question remains visible. For this subject, distancing be-
comes a possibility of aesthetic redemption. The aesthetic is accord-
ingly no longer defined as sensual appearance of the idea, as a man-
ifestation of something else, but rather as the truth of "mere"
semblance itself. Art no longer accomplishes the total mediation of
subject and world; rather, it becomes partial, as formulated by Dieter
Henrich in his critical adoption and continuation of Hegel's notion of
the end of art. The mediation of self and being is partial under the
aspect of a subject that has become problematic to itself-a mediation
on an inaccessible foundation. Henrich characterizes this mediation as
immemorial: it "must be carried out without the possibility of being
certain of it."37
All Flaubert's figural media can be interpreted as instruments of a
staging of such partiality. They themselves suppose that they are still
secure in the truth of their discourses; the irony of the implicit author,
however, deprives this belief of its foundation. It reveals the repre-
sented totality as a fictive one, in order to ground in it the partiality of
the ironic representation itself. Thus narrative discourse loses, along
with the innocence of discourses, the innocence of representation as
well. Instead of manifesting a given truth, it becomes an object-
indifferent medium of perception and reflection. This is the sense of
the well-known "absolute manner of seeing things" (maniere absolue de
voir les choses).38 Aesthetic experience's traditional dependence on the
object is replaced with a concern for reflection. With its problematic
mediation the art of the modern period makes itself its own theme
and in so doing compels the observer to reflect on this reflectedness.39
It leads to an aesthetic experience which becomes the tension between
a mediation which has taken place and a foundation which is inacces-
sible. Flaubert's dialogic irony is based in this tension. It transcends
the status of ironic negation in order to thematize itself-as irony of
irony. As sentimental citation it looks back, but it creates at the same
time the presupposition for other, and not necessarily ironic, man-
ifestations of aesthetic semblance become autonomous.
B. The Cited Narrative Subject Matter
Among the basic constituents of narrative disco

to the figure of the mediating narrator, the story
rates. Without a story, as indicated at the outs
narrative. But how is this story presented und
ironic narration? If axiological underdeterminatio
latter, then it is reasonable to suppose that its
fictio totius voluntatis can occur only to the extent
figure of the narrator, the story itself is also
negativity. Accordingly, just as analysis disclosed
postulate of impersonnalite as a withdrawal of the
this negativity, the supposition is natural that
postulate of the "book about nothing" (livre sur ri
out subject matter" (roman sans sujet),40 also conce
in line with which the text continues to be inform
only in ironic fashion.
In order to describe this state of affairs, I should
ing to refer to the distinction in the literary sem
Lotman between texts with and without sjuzet.
from the view that the real text, i.e., the particu
manifests an overarching cultural text, which
procedures can be reconstructed as a culture mod
of real text and culture model can be compar
lationship of discourse and discursive order, so th
might be read as a specific explication of Fouca
course, referred now to the order of narrative discourse. Culture
models, Lotman continues, have three basic characteristics. These
pertain to the division, the measurement, and the orientation of uni-
versal space. Central to division and measurement is a boundary
which divides the universal space into two nonintersecting subspaces
confronting each other as order and disorder or as two rival orders.
The real text reflects this overarching structure in order either to
affirm it or to enact it. In the former case the topological base-
opposition is projected onto the syntagmatic axis and stabilized in
paradigmatic repetition. In the latter case this projection leads to a
conflict which is manifested as a transgressing of the fundamental
topological boundary by the hero, i.e., by a figure who disengages
himself from his hereditary space and by whom the boundary, in
principle insurmountable, is nonetheless overcome. This transgres-
sing of the boundary can be met with sanctions by the existing order,
so that the initial situation is restored. The transgressing of the
boundary, however, can just as well shake an existin

it, or lead to a new order. In each case it marks an "e
Lotman as a "significant departure from the nor
tionary element, which sets itself in opposition to t
currently in force."42 It is precisely this event that
Lotman calls sjuzet. A text without sjuzet is a text in which no such
event occurs, in which the paradigmatic order is maintained from
beginning to end, whereas a text with sjuzet is a text whose subject
matter is characterized by eventfulness, i.e., by a more or less complex
structure of events organized around the transgressing of the central
topological boundary.
Lotman assumes that in each case this event "reflects what is re-
garded as an event within the given cultural text."43 With th

sumption he seeks to remedy a difficulty involved in the concep
orientation. Lotman defines this orientation of the universal spa
a culture model, or of the semantic space of a text that formulate
culture model, as the "congruence of a certain space with
perspective of the bearer of the text,"44 that is, with the perspec
from which both subspaces are interpreted semantically. The op
tion we/they is the most elementary form of such a perspe
semanticization of space, i.e., a semanticization that determ
orientation. This appears straightforward enough with respec
"given culture model"; nevertheless, it does not yet answer the q
tion of the orientation of the particular real text, which can relat
given culture model not only as a reflection of it but equally we
criticism or polemic. It will then bring into play counterorientati
which can coincide with the orientation of a rival culture model or
the other hand, can systematically reject orientation altogether. T
sure, Lotman reckons with an increase in complexity of orientatio
the basis of an increase in complexity of the models themselves;
continues, however, to presuppose a mimetic relationship bet
real text and cultural text, between individual discourse and over-
arching discursive order. Lotman does not consider the possibility
that a real text can work counterfactually, taking as event something
that in the cultural text has lost its eventful character, or, on the other
hand, interpreting as nonevent something that in the cultural refer-
ence text has the full status of an event. It is precisely this
dialectic-and not the isomorphism-of real text and cultural text,
however, that will concern us as we now turn to Flaubert's ironic
handling of subject matter, whereby again we shall have to confine
ourselves to Madame Bovary.
Topological organization and orientation of space seem initially to
present no problems here. The perspective is given with the central
personal medium, that is to say, with Emma, and

the novel seems to be full of events rather than a r
topological series of oppositions-near vs. far, inner
vs. open-is semanticized by Emma according t
Romantic discourse in terms of ennui vs. happiness
authenticity. Emma disengages herself from the c
the bourgeois world; after the ball at la Vaubyessa
ward anxiously to an "event" (p. 64), which approa
Rodolphe; she breaks with bourgeois norms, sh
boundary, she becomes a heroine. Her dreams are
too is provided for in the Romantic model. Em
eventful even in failure. The death scene thematizes this failure in
wholly Romantic terms: as a metaphysically compensated, definiti
transcending of the boundary, as the entrance into an authenticit
that was not to be had on earth: "Yet she was no longer so pale; he
face had an expression of serenity, as if the sacrament had he
her" (p. 331).
In view of such abundance of events, however, what can legitimize
the formulation livre sur rien? Obviously the fact that, while Emma's
perspective does mirror the orientation of the Romantic culture
model, this perspective, and thus also the textual orientation estab-
lished with it, is negated ironically. Emma's path is the path of her
readings: the definitive transcending of the boundary, the planned
flight to Italy, never materializes; the supposed eventfulness of her
love for Rodolphe disintegrates, as does later her love for Leon; only
in her perspective does the shabby Hirondelle remain the emblem of
Romantic longing; only in her perspective does Rouen, that "old
Norman city," become a "capital huge beyond measure" (p. 269), in
which she is transformed into a Babylonian courtesan. Precisely the
repetitive quality of her journey serves to undercut its supposed
eventfulness. Instead of attaining a qualitatively different space, she
stays in a lodging in bourgeois Rouen, and the death scene confronts
her "visions of eternal beatitude" (p. 330) with the empty ritual of a
narrow-minded priest. If, accordingly, the we/they opposition, as the
most elementary perspectival semanticization of space, guarantees
orientation, then such an opposition is no longer given in Madame
Bovary. Actual conflict does not materialize. Emma is the heroine of
her dreams, not a real threat to Yonville. On the contrary: others
profit from her escapades, which enable the usurer Lheureux to drive
her and her family to financial ruin. The underdetermined figure of
the husband, who in his naivete becomes virtually the accomplice in
the transgressing of the boundary, has among other things the func-
tion of giving prominence to this essential absence of eventful subject
matter. Here there is no "we" of the lovers in opposition to th

of bourgeois society, as there is in the Romantic reference
rather Emma is, in the total isolation that is her situation from the
very beginning, the victim of a discourse that is present only in the
citation and that is thereby ironically denied the status of a "given
culture model."
At the same time, however, this strategy of ironic negation excludes
any other orientation of semantic space. For no matter how much the
central locus of perspective is discredited as a binding center of
orientation, it nonetheless-precisely as locus of perspective, which it
remains-continues to block the assertion of other orientations
against it. The perspectival structure accomplishes simultaneously
discrediting of any sjuzet as illusionary prejudice and the affirma
of this illusion as aesthetic semblance. There is probably no pas
that shows this ambivalence more characteristically than the
apotheosis of Emma's beauty at the zenith of her love for Rodolph
"Never was Madame Bovary so beautiful as at that time; she had th
indefinable beauty that comes from joy, from enthusiasm, from
cess, and that is nothing but the harmony of temperament with c
cumstances. Her lusts, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, an
her ever-young illusions had developed her by degrees, as flowers
made by dung, rain, wind, and sun, and she blossomed finally in t
plenitude of her nature" (p. 199). Let us compare this with, for exam
ple, Chateaubriand's Atala: "She was perfectly beautiful; one noted
her face an indefinable quality of virtue and passion, the attraction
which was irresistible. To this she joined the most tender graces; a
extreme sensibility, united with a profound melancholy, revealed
self in her gaze; her smile was celestial."45 The beauty of the Roma
heroine is given in advance and will last until death; Emma's beaut
temporalized as a natural process of blossoming, in which th
anticlimax of the death scene, with its broad thematization of
creatural ugliness, is already implicitly announced. Corresponding t
the manifestation of transcendental sublimity in Atala's smile is, in
Emma's case, a merely contingent harmony of disposition and c
cumstances, and to the Romantic conflict of virtue and passion
rendering of the world of feeling in thoroughly physiological terms
means of an intentionally reductive complex of metaphors: lusts/dun
sorrowslrain, pleasure/wind, illusions/sun.
However, if this comparison with a blossom on which the sun has
shone, i.e., with a merely natural phenomenon, opposes Emma's fan
tasy to the ideality of Romantic longing, such devaluation is nonethe
less not the last word. Here again the ironic negation has already bee
canceled in advance in that structure that we designated above
irony of irony: Emma is the prisoner of her illusions

spite of but because of that fact that she is extraordi
The dependent, inauthentic, merely apparent characte
achieves independent status as an aesthetic sembla
transcendental truth is manifested and which precisely
is provocative. The reader can no longer immerse him
in this beauty; it is no longer an object of pure cont
rather-and in this lies the poetological relevance o
directs the reader's reflection to the thematic dissociation of aesthetic
semblance and philosophical truth, to the tension between sensual
fascination and denied significance.
Flaubert in his later years spoke of a certain "falseness of perspec-
tive" (faussete de la perspective) as a constitutive element of his new
aesthetics of perception.46 The formulation confirms what we have
described here as dissociation of perspective and orientation in Lot-
man's sense. This dissociation dominates the novel to the end. Young
Justin, whose character will one day be shaped by the same cliches as
was Leon's, weeps at Emma's grave. And even Charles, whom
Romantic discourse always passed by, is affected by it after Emma's
death, when he goes to see the neighbors "in order to be able to speak
of her" (p. 354). His death from love has about it nothing authentic; it
is as inauthentic as that of Emma herself. The text says expressly:
"She corrupted him from beyond the grave" (p. 349). Nevertheless,
or, once again, precisely for this reason, that end has its own fascina-
tion. It is not the supposed sublimity of Romantic fatality. The ex-
pression "fault of fate" (faute de lafatalite) remains, even when spoken
by Charles, a cliche. But it is a "great word, the only one he had ever
spoken" (p. 355).47 Romanticism is denounced in the cliche, and in the
cliche it rises again, no longer with the claim of authenticity but rather
as semblance no longer measured against truth.
It is certainly no accident that, in quite similar fashion, the end of
the Education sentimentale thematizes this survival of a discourse that
has become aesthetically autonomous. Mme Arnoux, whose sublimity
had always appeared only from Frederic's romanticizing point of
view, that is, always only in the faussete de la perspective, has, in her
Breton seclusion, begun to read novels herself; and when, in the last
meeting, Frederic is able to speak the language of Romantic discourse
only as an illusion that he has now seen through, the cliches rise up
again in the mouth of the beloved. In this farewell scene Mme Arnoux
is not merely the comic victim of her illusions, but rather at the same
time, and still more clearly than Emma, the figure who reveals the
extent to which her creator continues to be affected by that discourse
that he himself has deprived of its claim to truth.
In seeing this, however, we approach an answer to the still open

question regarding the bearer of the text (to use Lotman's term) that
cannot be identified simply with the subjects of a given culture model
mirrored in the text. Emma's perspective does not constitute a
Romantic "we." It does, however, constitute another "we," which does
not restore to the text its lost orientation, but which does permit
identification of its bearer. It is the "we" of a community of readers.
Jonathan Culler, in one of the most stimulating of recent monographs
on Flaubert, has advanced the thesis that in this ironic novel there is
nonetheless one theme that is not ironized, namely, the theme of the
pernicious effect of literature, and that it is here that its central defi-
ciency is to be seen: "If there is anything that justifies our finding the
novel limited and tendentious, it is the seriousness with which Emma's
corruption is attributed to novels and romances .... It is as if Flaubert
had allowed a cliche to occupy the center-stage without holding it in
the spotlight and subjecting it to any of the critical scrutiny or ironic
experimentation which apply in other cases."48
It seems to me that the relationship of this book to books at large is
more complex. In the represented world, even the ironizing of
Emma's romantically fictitious existence becomes the object of irony,
namely, on the occasion of the visit of Mme Bovary senior, who dis-
cerningly recognizes in Emma's readings the root of all evil and ar-
gues for a ban on books: "Hence it was resolved that Emma's reading
of novels would be stopped. The undertaking did not seem easy. The
good woman took it upon herself: when she passed through Rouen,
she was to go in person to the book-dealer and inform him that Emma
was stopping her subscriptions. Would one not have the right to
notify the police if the book-dealer persisted nevertheless in his pro-
fession of poisoner?" (pp. 129 f.). The scene is far more extensive in
the first version. In particular it includes Homais, who expatiates on
the physiological consequences of the exclusively cerebral activity of
reading; it then proceeds to a discussion of the "fashionable authors,"
with regard to whom he resigns himself with an ironic "I don't un-
derstand them," and he finally agrees wholeheartedly with the plan of
the mother-in-law: "And she had the approval of Mr. Homais, who,
although liberal, declared himself nonetheless in favor of order.
There was in the manner of the young woman, in her language, her
gaze, and extending even into her way of dressing, something that
scandalized their ideas, and they pursued it with that relentlessness
that animates governments and families against all originality" (p.
397). It is easy to see why Flaubert cut out a summary statement of this
sort, which would have shaped the action unironically in terms of the
Romantic opposition of individual and society and which would have
attributed to Emma the characteristic of originalite,

mere imitator, she does not have. However, if he thus ironizes the
Romantic model, he nonetheless retains the book-hating mother-in-
law, with whom that irony is in turn ironized. The theme of the
harmful effects of reading novels does not remain, as Culler sup-
poses, an "island of certainty" but rather is ironized by means of the
alternative of a threatened "prohibition of novels." This book-hating
mother-in-law, this "scandalized bourgeoise" (p. 197), becomes the
instrument by which the tables are turned again, and Emma, with her
hunger for books, and her subscription book-dealer in Rouen are
vindicated anew.
Along with Emma, however, this irony of irony also takes in that
figure to whom one least expects it to apply: the pharmacist Homais.
It is not only for reasons of textual economy that Flaubert leaves Mme
Bovary senior alone in the final version of the scene just cited and cuts
out Homais's supporting remarks. Homais, who does not understand
the "fashionable authors," is not per se an enemy of books. Against
the judgment of the priest Bournisien, he sees himself called to vocal
defense of literature, at least of the "good" literature of the En-
lightenment. But in his library there are works not only of Voltaire
and Rousseau but also of Walter Scott and even the Echo desfeuilletons
(p. 86); similarly, it is Homais who encourages Emma and Charles to
see Lucia di Lammermoor (p. 225), who in the course of time develops
eccentric tendencies similar to those of "Mme Bovary, his neighbor"
(p. 284), and who in the end, although he receives the Cross of the
Legion of Honor, disavows his bourgeois nature: "He came to blush at
being bourgeois. He affected the style of the artist; he smoked!" (p.
351). His difficulties with the "fashionable authors" seem to decrease,
and one may suppose that his daughters Irma-in name a "concession
to Romanticism" (p. 92)-and Athalie, perhaps also his son Napoleon,
read Madame Bovary under Napoleon III.
Emma is thus not so isolated as it may seem at first glance; and even
if her perspective no longer establishes the orientation of a Romantic
"we," there is nonetheless a "we" written into the novel, one that
connects the romanticizing bourgeois country doctor's wife with the
romanticizing bourgeois pharmacist and that also includes the creator
of both of them, the author Flaubert, who was himself a reader before
he was a writer, and who, like Homais, although not blushing at his
own bourgeois nature, nonetheless-as author-sought to shed it. It is
the "we" of a community of readers that sets itself apart from the
"they" of the nonreaders. With this "we," however, there comes into
view a bearer of the text that is not identical with the bearer of a given
culture model. It is the "we" from which, during the Empire and
beyond, the community of Flaubert's readers will be recruited.
C. Ironic Reading
What we characterized at the outset, in opposition to the internal

speech situation, as the external reception situation can be described
more closely from two angles: on the one hand, from the standpoint
of the fictional discourse itself, that is, in terms of what Wayne Booth
has called the rhetoric of fiction; and, on the other, from the
standpoint of the real reader, who introduces his own identity into the
role, given in advance by the text, of the implicit reader, or as Booth
terms it, the "postulated reader."49 This sociocultural and socio-
psychological identity of the real reader decides how the role of the
postulated reader is concretized in a particular case. The history of
approximations of and divergences from this role, that is, the history
of the freedom of the real reader in relationship to it, is the history of
the reception of a work. The postulated reader is accordingly not a
normative construct that could, or would want to, curtail this freedom
of the real reader. It is rather a heuristic construct, without which the
freedom of the real reader is not even describable. Individual con-
cretizations of a role can be demonstrated as such only to the extent
that one is able to refer systematically to a role construct.
This difference can be clarified through reference to the reader of
novels Emma Bovary. On the level of the narrated story, she appears
as a real reader, who concretizes Romantic novels in a way that can be
characterized today in full accord with the Freudian concept of iden-
tification, that is, as the "assimilation of an ego to an alien ego, in
consequence of which the first ego behaves in certain respects like
that other ego, imitates it, so to speak absorbs it."50 This identification,
which in Emma's case does not lead to construction of a stable ego
identity but rather to the hallucinatory confusion of fiction and real-
ity, is attributed both to her native disposition and to the frustrations
of her convent education; that is, reasons are presented which led to
reading having such a result. The implicit reader is assigned the task
of perceiving all this, and thereby the task of perceiving the ironic
disruption as a barrier to identification. The ironic style dissociates
the thing represented from the medium of representation; it defines,
as a maniere absolue de voir les choses, the reception situation as a per-
ception situation which thematizes the structures of perception
themselves. Flaubert's figural media prove indeed to be media, i.e.,
formal principles organizing perception, while as f

comprehended under the aspect of disintegration in
that dominate them and shape their characters. Such
however, is much more ruinous than the path of suf
discursive order that is held to be authentic ever could
extent Flaubert is entirely correct when he regards hi
reduction but as an intensification of the pathetic
writes to Louise Colet about his Bovary, "I believe, the
one sees a book that makes fun of its young leading-la
leading-man. The irony subtracts nothing from th
contrary, it exaggerates it."51 Irony directs the attitu
away from the initially suggested identification with
figures back to the uncompensatable loss of self as th
their suffering. It bases pathos in reflection and prec
able to "exaggerate" it. The pain, however, remains
tially the pain of others. The reader knows himself
Even the exaggerated suffering remains for him a sp
he is not involved.
Thus the dissociation of irony as a maniere absolue de voir les choses
and ironized medium as denied offer of identification refers back to
that esoteric exclusion of self that we described at the outset in con-
nection with Kierkegaard as the characteristic feature of ironic com-
munities of communication. Impersonnalite does not mean absence of
subjectivity but rather the negativity of the ironically free subject. In
this freedom it rescues itself in the face of the superior force of dis-
courses. By citing them ironically, it is the only capacity in this uni-
verse of discourse that is not determined by the cliche but rather that
acts with it, that denounces it as betise and at the same time holds fast
to it. Behind the defensive gesture of denunciation is concealed the
continued dialogue with truths that no longer define the context of
one's existence but that did so at one time and that, even in the status
of something negated, remain the only possibility by means of which
the ironic subject is able to articulate its identity. This implicit
dialogue of ironic discourse can, however, be fulfilled only to the
extent that like-minded persons join it. The relation to truths that
have been seen through is the truth of irony, which as such cannot
remain solipsistic but rather demands a reader. The implicit reader of
Flaubert is the subject of an ironic reading, a reading that, coming
from the "library," shares the distance of the author from the cited
discourses and their victims.
Jean-Paul Sartre has rightly stressed that Flaubert, despite all ap-
parent reader rejection, was the accepted, indeed the decorated, au-
thor of the Second Empire. Flaubert had an audience, a bourgeois
audience, more precisely an enlightened elite, which Sartre locates in
the upper levels of the "middle classes."52 He bases this suppositi

his sociopsychological hypothesis of an "objective neurosis"
bourgeois intelligentsia, so goes the hypothesis, is by nature esse
republican; it lives, however, with the trauma of the proletaria
pressed in the June Massacre of 1848; it seeks a compensation fo
trauma in a scientistic ideology, behind which is concea
sadomasochistic hatred of its own class; and it is precisely this
that it encounters in the work of Flaubert, which similarly, in the g
of scientistic impersonnalite, indulges in a deep misanthropy.
In this hypothesis several frames of reference are "totalized"
way that makes it difficult to separate what is plausible from m
speculation. Standing at the greatest distance from empirical ve
ability is surely the psychoanalytical hypothesis of a compensat
hate-reading. To be sure, Sartre does not develop this hypothes
terms of identical conflict constellations in the represented wor
in the psyche of the reader, but rather in terms of an "identific
with the author."53 This author, however, is not the implicit aut
the works but rather the biographical individual Gustave Fla
reconstructed from the correspondence, whose subjective neuro
hypostasized as the objective neurosis of"the" Flaubert-reader u
the Empire. Sartre does not display the Flaubert who, as aut
Madame Bovary and the Education sentimentale, himself themati
the mode of irony this neurotic synthesis of Romantic norms an
historical situation that denies them. This is not to say th
bourgeois elite of the Empire already read Flaubert from th
tanced standpoint of ironic negativity. On the contrary, those
ments bearing on the reception of Flaubert that have hitherto b
accessible rather confirm the suspicion of a "realistic" mis
derstanding, as articulated in particular in the Bovary trial. This
understanding suits Sartre well. He does not inquire into its
ble formal conditions (for example, the obvious inability to rec
immediately the new irony techniques as such), but rather a
solely with reference to the pathology of an audience that,
maintains, had surrendered itself to its hate-reading, "derealizi
self in the real, that is, realizing itself in the unreal."54 In this i
ifested the difficulty that this ideological critique has with
semblance. It cannot affirm it as semblance but can only denou
as false consciousness.
There can be no question that Sartre's sociological identification
the reader of Flaubert is accurate-and, no doubt, not only for
Empire. On the other hand, the actual history of Flaubert's recept
remains to be written, and it is reasonable to suppose that the
proximation to each other of implicit and real reader, and thus th
realization of the irony of irony, only become possible to the exte
that consciousness of language and critique of language

themselves as distinguishing marks of the modern period
monumental work can also be read as a defense against a thr
trust in the independent power of the subject and the l
available to it; the actually disturbing quality of Flaubert see
all to lie in the fact that he has already included all discours
him-hence also, and precisely, that of an ideological critiq
ironic critique of discourse.
UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH
(Translated by Michael Morton)
NOTES
1 Communications, No. 8 (1966), pp. 1-27.

2 Communications, No. 8, p. 22.
3 See in this regard Niklas Luhmann, "Funktionale Methode und Systemt
Soziologische Aufkliirung (Opladen, 1971), pp. 31-53.
4 Michel Foucault, L'Ordre du discours (Paris, 1973).
5 Cited according to M. Fabii Quintiliani institutionis oratoriae libri XII,
Helmut Rahn, 2 vols. (Darmstadt, 1975).
6 Harald Weinrich, Linguistik der Liige, 5th ed. (Heidelberg, 1974), p. 65.
7 Weinrich, p. 61.
8 I take the concept of ironic establishment of solidarity from Wolf-Dieter
"Ironie als Sprechhandlung," in Das Komische, ed. Wolfgang Preisendanz
Warning, Poetik und Hermeneutik, 7 (Munich, 1976), pp. 205-35. The rei
tion proposed here of Weinrich's "third person" as the second does not
exclude the possibility that, along with this second person, the object-perso
can also be an addressee of the act of irony. In this case the general comm
model would be instantiated in the form of a "multiply addressed utterance"
regard Dieter Wunderlich, Linguistische Pragmatik [Frankfurt, 1972], pp. 36
object-person is the sole addressee, then we have what Stempel calls the "clo
tion of the confrontational Two-Person-Relationship," a problematic border
virtue of the restrictions thus placed on the goal of establishing solidarity (p
9 Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2nd ed. (Mun
p. 830.
10 See in this regard the author's "Pour une pragmatique du discours fictionnel,"
Poetique, No. 39 (1979), pp. 321-37.
11 Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), pp. 158 f.
12 F. K. Stanzel, Typische Formen des Romans (Gottingen, 1964), as well as, recently,
Theorie des Erziihlens (Gottingen, 1979).
13 Story here means what French critics call histoire (as opposed to discours) and not
what E. M. Forster had in mind when he differentiated between "story" and "plot."
14 C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning, 10th ed. (London, 1972),
esp. ch. 3 ("Sign-Situations").
15 Kierkegaard, Uber den Begriff der Ironie (Frankfurt, 1976), p. 244.
16 Kierkegaard, p. 253.
17 Hegel, Asthetik, ed. Friedrich Bassenge (Frankfurt, n.d.), I, 76.
18 Hegel, p. 117.
23 Letter of 4 September 1850, Correspondance (Paris, 1926-33), II, 239.
24 Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (New York, 1921), p. 62.
25 Cited according to the edition of Claudine Gothot-Mersch (Paris, 1971), p. 167
(translation by Michael Morton).
26 Madame Bovary: Nouvelle version precede des scenarios inedits, ed. Jean Pommier and
Gabrielle Leleu (Paris, 1949), p. 381 (translation by Michael Morton).
27 I use this concept in the sense of what Michail Bakhtin calls the "immanent
dialogicity" of the "two-voiced prose word" (Die Asthetik des Wortes, ed. Rainer Grubel
[Frankfurt, 1979], esp. pp. 154 ff.). Bakhtin's studies show that the metaphorical use of
this concept does not hinder its heuristic function. Bakhtin addresses the connection of
irony and dialogicity but does not himself explicate it. "Roy Pascal's discussion of free
indirect speech in Flaubert has many things in common with my own. Pascal, however,
analyses the 'dual voice' not so much as a structure producing ironic ambiguities, but
rather as narratorial usurpation of a character's vision and, hence, as artistic failure.
But is it really a fault, if narratorial presence imputes to a character like Emma Bovary
'an aesthetic compensation she is far from seeking or feeling'?" (The Dual Voice
[Manchester, 1977], pp. 98 ff., p. 111).
28 Foucault, p. 49.
29 J. P. Richard, Paysage de Chateaubriand (Paris, 1967), p. 162.
30 "Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je," Ecrits (Paris, 1966),
I, 89-97. Lacan describes here the small child's fascination with its mirror image as the
prototype of a "constitutive misapprehension of the self," i.e., an identification process
that is unaware of its fictive dimension. On the basis of a fundamental lack, a totality is
anticipated that in fact can be only the "armor of an alienating identity": the phantom
of an ego that does not notice the noncoincidence of ego and subject.
31 See in this regard Albert Thibaudet, Gustave Flaubert (Paris, 1935), p. 92. More
important than the question of authenticity in this connection is, it seems to me, a
remark of Flaubert to Louise Colet: "Have you not seen that all the irony by which I
assail sentiment in my works was only the cry of the vanquished unless it be a song of
victory?" (Letter of 25 February 1854, Correspondance, IV, 29 f.).
32 Letter to Louise Colet, 8/9 May 1852, Correspondance, II, 408 f.
33 Foucault, pp. 18 ff.
34 Foucault, pp. 12 ff.
35 Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Idiot de lafamille, I (Paris, 1971), 624.
36 The corresponding passages are easy to find in the variants section of the Gothot-
Mersch edition, especially for pp. 92, 93, 120, 129, 221.
37 Dieter Henrich, "Kunst und Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart (Uberlegungen mit
Riicksicht auf Hegel)," in Immanente Asthetik-Asthetische Reflexion, ed. Wolfgang Iser,
Poetik und Hermeneutik, 2 (Munich, 1966), p. 20.
38 Letter to Louise Colet, 16 January 1852, Correspondance, II, 346.
39 In this sense Henrich speaks of "doubled reflection" as the distinguishing mark of
partial art ("Kunst und Kunstphilosophie der Gegenwart," p. 28).
40 See Henrich, p. 20.
41 I refer to Die Struktur literarischer Texte (Munich, 1972), as well as to the central
essay "Zur Metasprache typologischer Kultur-Beschreibungen," in Aufsdtze zur Theorie
und Methodologie der Literatur und Kultur, ed. Karl Eimermacher (Kronberg, 1974),
pp. 338-77.
42 Lotman, Struktur, pp. 333 f.

43 Lotman, "Metasprache," p. 371.
44 Lotman, "Metasprache," p. 349.
45 Cited according to Chateaubriand, A
p. 50.
46 Letter to Joris-Karl Huysmans, February/March 1879, Correspondance, VIII, 224.
47 On the matter of the ambivalence of this "great word," see also Hans Robert Jauss,
"Der Fall 'Madame Bovary,' " in Die Grunenthal Waage (1963), p. 14.
48 Jonathan Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (London, 1974), p. 146.
49 Booth, p. 177.
50 Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einfiihrung in die Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt, 1969), p. 501.
51 Letter to Louise Colet, 9 October 1852, Correspondance, III, 43.
52 Sartre, L'Idiot de lafamille, III (Paris, 1972), 206 ff.
53 Sartre, III, 324.
54 Sartre, III, 340.

Antología de León Felipe

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Antología de León Felipe

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Irony and the "Order of Discourse" in Flaubert

Author(s): Rainer Warning and Michael Morton

T HE AIM of the following essay is to show, through consideration

fairy tale: to refer exclusively to relationships imm

discourse within a given social formation, dogmaticization, and bar

It can be supposed that Foucault's outline of a theory of discourse

himself in that distance for the renewed "realization" of what is cited.

I. From Ironic Speech Act to Ironic Discourse

Irony has rarely been described as a specific type of discourse. In

cation model of speaker and hearer by adding to it a third perso

assume the argumentation of this object-person (th

SPEAKER establishment HEARER

sentence. In view of the constraints of the rhetorical

rator), that is, to what F. K. Stanzel calls the figural narrative

into a pragmatically foundedfictio totius voluntatis, that is, one fou

comes functionally ambivalent; that which is excluded, distanc

means with regard exclusively to its power to neg

A. The Citing Subject of Narration

Narrative situations are first of all purely descriptive catego

central locus of perspective, the figural mediu

subject (sujet de 1'enonciation). For there are always two subjec

is apparent from the Scenarios, where the first paragr

The pragmatic relationships are here so unambiguous that there is no

teme since Plato, to conceal the societally and institutionally med

the discourse of the figure; and in this sense the

affairs that still presents itself to reflection as a puzzle defying

The possibility of citation presupposes distance, eccentricity. Such

phants, who returned again to the stable, a green c

B. The Cited Narrative Subject Matter

Among the basic constituents of narrative disco

boundary, however, can just as well shake an existin

garded as an event within the given cultural text."43 With th

personal medium, that is to say, with Emma, and

matter. Here there is no "we" of the lovers in opposition to th

irony of irony: Emma is the prisoner of her illusions

In seeing this, however, we approach an answer to the still open

attributed to Emma the characteristic of originalite,

What we characterized at the outset, in opposition to the internal

formal principles organizing perception, while as f

the upper levels of the "middle classes."52 He bases this suppositi

that consciousness of language and critique of language

(Translated by Michael Morton)

1 Communications, No. 8 (1966), pp. 1-27.

42 Lotman, Struktur, pp. 333 f.

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