Signature Pieces

Front matter

SIGNATURE PIECES

ON

THE INSTITUTION OF AUTHORSHIP

Preface

ParTI ROUSSEAU AND THE MODERN SIGNATURE

CHAPTER ONE The Name of a Problem CHAPTER Two Contracting the Signature CHAPTER THREE Author of a Crime CHAPTER Four Seeing through Rousseau CONCLUSION Endpiece

ParTII No ONE SIGNS FOR THE OTHER CHAPTER Five Baudelaire au féminin CHAPTER Sıx Penelope at Work

Index

Vil

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you—Nobody—too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d banish us—you know!

How dreary—to be—Somebody!

How public—like a Frog—

To tell your name—the livelong June— To an admiring Bog!

—Emily Dickinson

(Anyway I’ve had now to sing glad pleas for happy gladdings of more endless pops & goes. I have signed my name but now I feel awfully frightened. Am I saying wisely in these solemn legalnesses) that any little murder, caused by here & there, has been quite let off by my names having been signed so beautifully!??

—Stevie Smith

Preface

Like most books, this one “began” before it began. Its several preoccupations—signature, authorship, the gender of the writer or writing— had been dogging me for a long time. In particular, I was pursued by a persistent dissatisfaction with the way in which these terms tended to get confused or even collapsed into one another by most discourse concerned with the relation between writer and writing, and especially between the woman writer and her writing. That relation continued to be thought largely according to notions of representation, expression, the fully present intentionality of a subject, and so forth. I had been convinced for some time by demonstrations, most notably in the writings of Jacques Derrida, that such notions contributed essential elements to the metaphysical construction of women’s exclusion, to the “phallocentrism” at the base of virtually all Western habits of thought. I was also convinced, therefore, that deconstructing this exclusion could not be a matter only of enlarging the field of expression to include “feminine” subjects, or writers, or writings. Unless this expansion is accompanied by a rethinking of some fundamental categories that have classified us as subjects, however discerning or changed the aspects of that subjectivity may appear, then the chances for displacement of the fundamental structures of exclusion are no doubt considerably lessened. Such rethinking, or rather thinking-beyond-the-subject, has been going on for some vii viii / Preface time now in many quarters and in many modes. This book merely gathers some of my own (halting and insufficient} attempts to give it its chance.

That these attempts or essays have come together under the single or singular title of “signature” may seem somewhat arbitrary at first glance. But, I would argue, it is the place of the signature that has been largely ignored, elided, or simply filled in by the presuppositions shaping much past and present discourse about the writer in/and his/her writing. The principal reason for this neglect is that this “place” is not a place at all, but an always divisible limit within the difference between writer and work, “life” and “letters.” Signature articulates the one with the other, the one in the other: it both divides and joins. It is this double-jointedness of signatures that will be lost to any discourse that continues to posit an essential exteriority of subjects to the texts they sign.

If we ask: What happens when someone writes his or her name in the mode of a signature? we may begin to see that this everyday occurrence is supported by immense conventional systems that tend to hide the precariousness of a general understanding of that act. For the most part, these conventions allow us to perform, in a more or less reliable manner, operations of identification, attestation, verification, attribution of responsibility, and so forth. Indeed, many social institutions thoroughly depend, in one way or another, on the reliable functioning of signatures, and whole areas of law can be said to be concerned almost exclusively with the rights and duties guaranteed by signatures (e.g., contract, property, and copyright law). The legal signature signals that, usually on a certain date and according to certain formalities, the subject named was present and assented to, accepted, affirmed some accord with another party. “The subject named” is thus first of all assumed to be present to himself or herself for the accord to have taken place between the identifiable parties to it. This accord presumes, moreover, that the signature represents a particular person, the bearer of a certain proper name and no other. It presumes, in other words, the possibility of singling out one subject from all others. But since names circulate within the

Preface / ix public domain of language, they can always be changed or borrowed or duplicated. Supplementary guarantees of the singularity of signature must therefore be given, such as the notion of the verifiable differentiation of its mark. When you sign, you do not merely write your name, which anyone could do in your place: you affix your name as a particular mark. The singularity of the autograph, however, cannot be absolute; on the contrary, verifiability or authentication relies on its reproducibility by “the subject named.” If every time you sign your name, you deliberately make a significantly different mark, if no two of your signature acts resemble each other, then there is no telling after you have signed whether it was indeed you who signed. After a while, even you may forget having made some particular mark. Here the grounding assumption is that “the subject named” is not only self-identical with itself in the moment of signing but as well remains recognizably the same over time. By a seeming paradox, then, the singularity of the signature’s mark depends on its limitation within recognizable parameters of reproducibility or iterability, which is to say of generalizability. The signature, therefore, is always detachable from the singular instance it supposedly designates. It can always be and in fact already has been detached from the signatory and expropriated by a field of general substitution. This is to remark that, within such a field of general substitution and exchange, “the subject named” is always finally a general subject, classified in a large but nevertheless limited number of ways. The particularization of this general subject through the functioning of signature is thus also always countersigned by the system of interchangeable likenesses, the system of the same in which singularity is but a necessary concept.

There are also, however, occasions when this conventional understanding is loosened and we are allowed to see the signature operating on its own, so to speak, as a particular use of the proper name. Such occasions are written works (literature in the general sense) bearing an author’s signature which also make bare its uncertain operation. Yet the modern study of literature has largely contrived to look away from this exposed condition of the signature. To do so, it has dressed the signature x / Preface in various guises: psychological, historical, formal, ideological. Working together, these constructs have produced what may be called the institution of authorship, an institution that masks or recuperates the disruptive implications of literary signature. Our investment in this institution is massive. All sorts of values are exchanged within its construction. There are enormous profits to be had, of course, and questions of what returns to whom, who gets what return, and who has rights over what—all these basically economic questions agitate the scene of the signature but also inscribe its unsettling otherness within an economy of the same. It is finally to this economy that the greater profits return; anyone can hold shares in it for the price of identification with authors via their written representatives, foremost and most essential among which is the signature.

By shifting some of the accumulated weight of authorship on the way we read and the way we act on what we read, this book attempts to recover some of the pieces that have fallen into the cracks of the identificatory economy. Three leverage points are used: the example of Rousseau’s signature as a particularly lucid experience of dissociation between author and text; the signatures of Baudelaire and Woolf as demonstrations of how a signature’s gender can also be interrupted; finally, two moments in a recent (but also long-running) theoretical debate over authorship, intentionality, and reading by identification. The first part is to be read as chapters in what I initially call a history of Rousseau’s signature; the second and third parts each pair two essays with results that I hope are illuminating for both even though they may be read separately.

Despite the apparent or implied continuity from one chapter to the next, these pieces are not forced into a whole or made to yield some general theory of the signature. indeed, it is the very possibility of generalizing in this domain of the singular that has to be put in question, even as it is also the signature’s lot to suffer the constraints of the general laws limiting its singularity. That double exigency has been the constant companion of these pages.

I refer to published translations whenever such works are available. In all other cases, translations are my own.

Preface / xi

Parts of this book have previously appeared elsewhere. A somewhat different version of chapter 5, “Baudelaire au féminin,” was initially published in Paragraph 8 (1986), edited by Diana Knight; a shorter version of chapter 6, “Penelope at Work,” first appeared in Novel 16 (Fall 1982); chapter 7, ‘Floating Authorship,” was published in Diacritics 16 (Winter 1986); chapter 8, “Pieces of Resistance,” was originally a contribution to the volume Reading De Man Reading, edited by Wlad Godzich and Lindsay Waters and published by University of Minnesota Press (1988). I here thank all the publishers for their kind permission to use these texts.

SIGNATURE PIECES

Introduction

A Single Line Divided

Early in Le Rouge et le noir, when Julien Sorel enters the church at Verriéres which will later be the scene of his attempted assassination of Mme de Rénal, the narrator explains that Julien “thought it might be useful to his hypocrisy to stop off in the church.”! The excuse of the hero’s hypocrisy is a clever one since it both names and camouflages the hypocritical agency of the narrative, which is—like Julien, we might say— interested only in its own advancement beneath the cover of some higher or at least different purpose. This brief interlude in the church is constructed entirely out of elements prefiguring Julien’s arrivisme, crime and punishment. The novel thereby parades its foreknowledge that where it is going is where it has been, and it invites the reader to share in the irony that Julien alone remains ignorant of the fate prepared for him. Since, however, Julien’s ignorance is a pretext for the narrative to unfold this twice-told tale,2 the hypocritical detour needs to establish it in the clearest way. And what better way could there be than to show Julien as a failed reader of his own name on a death sentence?

1Stendhal, Red and Black, trans. Robert M. Adams (New York, 1969), 18.

2The crime and execution of Antoine Berthet, which had supplied the general outlines of Stendhal’s plot, was a well-discussed scandal by the time the novel was published in 1830.

I

All alone in the church, he took a seat in the finest pew. It bore M. de Rénal’s coat of arms.

On the lectern, Julien noted a scrap of printed paper, set out there as if for him to read. He glanced at it and saw:

Details of the execution and the last moments of Louis Jenrel, executed at Besançon, on the—

The paper was torn. On the other side were the first words of a line: The first step. ...

Who could have left this paper here? thought Julien. Poor fellow, he added with a sigh, his name has the same ending as mine. ... He crumpled up the paper.

As he went out, Julien imagined he saw a pool of blood by the baptismal font; it was merely some holy water which had been spilled; the red curtains covering the windows made it look like blood.

At last, Julien grew ashamed of his secret terrors.

Am I going to be a coward? he said. To arms!

Julien taking the place of M. de Rénal, signaled by his coat of arms, then rushing from the church with the cry of “To arms!” as he executes the first step toward what will be his last moments in Besancon: the irony accumulated with each of these traits sets the scene apart, lifts it out of the successive narration, or rather forms a loop in that narration, a point where the two ends of its thread cross and draw up ina circle. At the center of the circle, the fate of a name, torn from its reference, fragmented, left for anyone to read, a collection of letters that submits to the arbitrary principles of resemblance, repetition, combination. The name ends in -rel, but also it ends up by ending in -rel: its fate is to end up providing a rhyming syllable for Sorel. Julien decapitates the name and appropriates what is left: “his name has the same ending as mine.” The irony is that Julien recognizes a resemblance between the names as a succession of letters but cannot see the resemblance between the fates of the names, their ending in decapitation. The Louis Jenrel named in the fragment has ended up as the name of someone decapitated; saying his name ends like mine, Julien says also

3Stendhal, 20.

without realizing it: his name ends as mine will end, detached from its bearer, naming finally only that detachment.

This fragment of text about a fragment of text is also about the fragmentation of names as arbitrary signifiers that, at any moment, can be cut off from their referent—the bearer of the name—and left to their fate, floating in the currents of chance encounters with readers who are free to associate a meaning with the name. Of course, Julien Sorel’s encounter with the name of Louis Jenrel is one of chance only within the frame of the fiction. Stepping outside that frame, one finds a ready answer to his question “Who could have left this paper here?” in the other name—Stendhal—that floats over this scene and calculates the placing of the exact anagram, “left there as if for him to read.”

This loop in the narrative is what may be called a signature piece (as one says a signature tune), that is, a device repeatedly associated with a subject. The encrypting of proper names is such a device for Henri Beyle, who never signed with his proper proper name and who invented hundreds of pseudonyms or cryptonyms for himself and his relations. Because Beyle always signs by signing not “Beyle” but some other name, it is not so much his signature that is encrypted as an encrypting that is his signature. “Louis Jenrel,’’ as one such anagrammatic encrypting, is also a barely disguised signature of Henri Beyle.

But the name(s} of the author—Stendhal/Henri Beyle—does not simply point to someone behind the scenes, pulling the strings. It too is displayed in the scene like a fragment of text set out in order to be read. The assonance or near rhyme of those two names—Louis Jenrel/Henri Beyle—signals that the proper name of the signatory has not simply been left out of the loop to be replaced or protected by the device of encrypting. What is more, the name Rénal, which is also circulating in the scene, ends like Stendhal. Both pairs of names—Jenrel/Beyle, Stendhal/Rénal—are paired in their final syllables according to the principle of resemblance that Julien remarks. This effect, one suspects, can no longer be read simply within the calculation of Beyle’s signature, its deliberate veiling, or its disrespect for orthography that makes possible the ironic distance installed in the narration. The name Beyle/Stendhal has itself gotten caught up in the textual network through a fragmentation that can always divide any name from itself and associate it with fragments of other names which spell the end of proper reference to an integral subject. The name functions already as the subject of a death sentence. No less than Julien Sorel, the name Henri Beyle/Stendhal ends by prefiguring its own end in the text it cannot sign from any safe distance. The signature piece, then, when inserted in the field of fragmenting forces which is a text, leaves the signature in pieces.

These pieces of the signature Beyle/Stendhal can serve to introduce what has been “left there as if to be read” in the following essays. In particular, they point to the necessary detachment of the signature from the signatory, of the sign from any singular, historical referent. The process by which Henri Beyle can take Stendhal, the proper name of a place, as signature is the same process that has to allow “Stendhal” to become detached again from the signatory. It is already detached and the signatory is already outlived by the signature even when, at the moment he signs, his death is only announced or prefigured as a still future event. The structure of this already, or, in another idiom, of this déjà, marks every signature, as Jacques Derrida observes, taking the example of his own abbreviated name:5

4From Stendal, now a town in East Germany.

5Derrida, Jacques is already déjà. Once remarked, the dissemination of this proper name through the temporal adverb (or the spatial adverb derriére) seems to have as well the effect of appropriating the common use, diverting public funds for private benefit. Derrida elsewhere has commented on this effect: “playing with one’s own name, putting it in play, is, in effect, what is always going on... . But obviously this is not something one can decide: one doesn’t disseminate or play with one’s name. The very structure of the propername sets this process in motion. That’s what the proper name is for. At work, naturally, in the desire—the apparent desire—to lose one’s name by disarticulating it, disseminating it, is the inverse movement. By disseminating or losing my own name, I make it more and more intrusive; I occupy the whole site, and as a result my name gains more ground. The more I lose, the more I gain.” The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie McDonald (New York, 1985), 76. As I make clear later on, Glas is concerned with precisely this uncertain economy of loss and gain which it would be illusory to think could somehow balance out for the signatory, or make any difference, finally, in the structure of signing. Perhaps less read the déjà [already] as an abbreviation. When I sign, I am already dead. I hardly have the time to sign than I am already dead, that I am already dead. I have to abridge the writing, hence the siglum, because the structure of the “signature” event carries my death in that event. Which means it is not an “event” and perhaps signifies nothing, written out of a past that has never been present and on the basis of [depuis] the death of someone who has never been alive.6

When I sign, I am already dead because, according to the inexorable logic of the deictic or shifter, its singular referent—me— will have already submitted to the requirement of its generalization in order to signify itself. I cannot say—or sign—what I mean, and I say precisely what I do not mean.’ By the same token, “I” spells the death of me; it is already the effacement of a singular nature in a common sig-nature.

The phrase “the death of the author” ought to come to mind here. And indeed, the pages that follow will frequently encounter that figure, although not always in the same guise. The phrase has gained a certain currency among literary theorists both as a shorthand for a nonhermeneutic thinking about texts and as a label against which to react in the name of the historical subject. The brandishing of the phrase as a token in some struggle has not helped to illuminate its possible import because the question of whether one is for or against the “death of the author” obviously makes little sense in itself. For this reason, it may be helpful to review one of the sources of the controversial slogan: the brief essay by Roland Barthes titled, precisely, “The Death of the Author.’’8 clear is what happens when that signature is cited, as it is here, to back up claims being made about signatures in general.

6Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln, Nebr., 1986), 19, right col.; translation modified; further references will be included in the text.

7See Paul de Man’s reading of the phrase from Hegel’s Encyclopedia “so kann ich nicht sagen was ich nur meine” as first “I cannot say what I make mine,” then “I cannot say what I think,” and finally “I cannot say I.” “Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Summer 1982), 768.

8Barthes, “La Mort de l'auteur,” in Le Bruissement dela langue (Paris, 1984); English translation by Stephen Heath in the collection Image-Music-Text (New York, 1977). Page references will be to this translation.

First published in 1968, this essay bears the stamp of Barthes’s association with the “avant-garde” journal Tel Quel through its notion of a break that divides literature’s modern history between the age of the author and the age of the text, or, in Barthes’s terms, between the ages of the writer and the scriptor. In particular, the name Mallarmé, whose “entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing,” situates the break. While Barthes characterizes this break in several ways, there is also a recognition at the outset that “in ordinary culture” the image of literature remains ‘‘tyrannically centred on the author. . . . The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us” (143). Seeing in the positivism “which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author” “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology,” the telquelien argument advances “nonordinary” culture’s role as an avant-garde overturning the ideological supports that have made authors into the owners of their texts. The analogy with property is itself closely linked to an analogy with filiation, as Barthes reminds us:

The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child. In complete contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate. (145)

Rather than the romantic expression of an Author, the modern text’s mode is inscription of “a field without origin—or which, at least has no other origin than language itself.” Barthes goes to Flaubert and to the “profound ridiculousness” of Bouvard and Pécuchet for a confirmation that the “text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumberable centres of culture [in which] the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original” (146).

This brief essay concludes by a shift that replaces the distinction Author/scriptor with its parallel distinction Critic/reader. The shift is motivated when Barthes observes that the ideology supporting the position of the Author has had one clear beneficiary: the Critic.

To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is ‘‘explained’’—victory to the critic. (147)

The Critic’s “victory,” if it could ever be won, would operate a check on the text’s “anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.” The scriptor/text’s counterpart cannot, therefore, be a Critic. Rather, it is “simply that someone” called “the reader”:

a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. (148)

The final sentence of the essay places the future of writing in the balance between “the death of the author’ and the “birth of the reader.”

There is not far to go from “The Death of the Author,” the essay, to the quotation of that title as a polemical slogan.

Barthes is already writing in a polemical style, favoring reductive summary and rapid judgments to any more patient procedure. His stance here is somewhat that of spokesman representing to a broader readership (broader, that is, than the readership of Tel Quel) the results of the more patient work that he and others were carrying out elsewhere. (The essay begins, in fact, with a reflection on a passage from Sarrasine which would later be expanded into the line-by-line reading of that story in S/Z.) Once this situation of address is recognized or admitted, and there is no reason it should not be admitted, then any dispute with its accepted limitations would be misplaced. Yet, to the extent the essay also represents or anticipates the polemical form that was to develop as an accompaniment to certain changes taking place in the practice of literary criticism, and because that accompaniment has tended to grab center stage,’ there may be reason to go back over some of this ground more slowly.

Barthes deploys two seemingly contradictory senses of his title in the essay. On the one hand, the “death of the author” would refer to the eidetic law of any writing:

Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. No doubt it has always been that way [italics added]. As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the

9The role of this polemical accompaniment may have assumed the particular shape it has in the United States because literary critical practice is there more confined within the single institution of the university and consequently more apt to mistake institutional effects for criteria of critical evaluation. For a discussion of some effects of “market” on American literary theory, see Jonathan Culler, “Criticism and Institutions: The American University,” in Post- Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoffrey Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge, 1987). On the other hand, in France, for example, precisely because “literature” is less institutionalized, fundamentally the same polemic has been taken up by the “mass media” to a far greater extent, but with even less circumspection. Barthes’s essay bears the stamp of this journalistic mode.

very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. (142)

On the other hand, the phrase has a specific historical reference to the activity of certain late-nineteenth and early-twentiethcentury writers (Flaubert, Mallarmé, Valéry, de Quincey, Proust, the Surrealists are mentioned) who sought to loosen the hold of the Author, itself a concept with a specific history, on writing.

The author is a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of the individual.... In France, Mallarmé was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. (142—43]

Considered together, the two senses of the phrase imply a certain narrative of truth in which the second, historical sense acts to retrieve the first, nonhistorical sense that had been lost or covered over through the aberrant historical invention of the Author. The problem with such an implied narrative is that it can easily come to resemble the theological narratives of the very sort “the truly revolutionary” activity of writing is supposed to refuse. Furthermore, the problem is not just dormant in the essay but fully awakened when Barthes closes on the figure he calls the reader, described in the terms we have already quoted:

The reader is the space on which all the quotations that makeupa writing are inscribed without any of them being lost [sans qu’aucune ne se perde); a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone [italics in the original] who holds togetherin a single field all the traces [dans un même champ toutes les traces] by which the written text is constituted. (148)