Jean-Luc Benoziglio: Language and the Text

language has little or no grasp on extra-linguistic phenomena. Writers have, no doubt, always been conscious of the problem of making language express exactly what they want it to express, and one remembers particularly the comment of Flaubert's Rodolphe that la parole humaine est comme chaudron fele ou nous battons les melodies a faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les etoiles (196). In more recent times, however, the difficulty of finding exactly the right words to match the experiences, emotions and ideas that the writer wishes to convey, or of finding the words to describe the events and happenings in the world around the writer, has developed into doubt about the ability of language to refer to anything outside of itself. Beginning with Saussure's affirmation that lien unissant le signifiant au signifie est arbitraire (100), the link between signifier and signified has been seen as more and more arbitrary, and, finally, the very idea that there is such a link has been placed in doubt Language is seen as an autonomous system of signs governed, not by referents, but by their relationship to other signs. These relationships can often escape the logic of the speaking subject, who has no control over them, and language seems to obey its own inscrutable laws. With the idea that language has no referential function there necessarily comes the belief that literature cannot reflect in any way a reality exterior to the text As Prendergast puts it: Mimetic or representational notions have been exposed as an 'illusion* in the sense of a rhetorical trick designed to mask the arbitrary character of the literary sign (2). At the same time, these theories have produced a certain distrust of language that is particularly critical for the writer of literary texts. They have created what Derrida calls un formidable mouvement d'une inquietude sur le - qui ne peut etre qu'une inquietude du et dans le langage (60). Jean-Luc Benoziglio's texts are especially instructive in examining the effect of this mistrust on the writer, and they serve as an excellent example of a writer attempting to recognise and to come to grips with the problems of language. Although Benoziglio's early novels appear at first to refer to events taking place in a recognisable real world, it soon becomes apparent that much of what we read is being imagined in someone's mind. Furthermore, incidents are repeated, while the voice and the viewpoint tend to change confusingly. In Quelqiiunbis est mort, someone seems to be observing a steeply ascending street on which are a church, a cemetery, a mental hospital and a railway station, and which a funeral procession is climbing. This is mingled with memories of a lovers' quarrel, of the departure of a woman called Clocharde, and of the death of some other person. There are several presumably imagined scenes, such as the one in which the funeral procession is attacked by Indians. Le midship begins with the description of a young girl trying to retrieve her toy boat, which has become stuck in the middle of a pond (probably in the Luxembourg Gardens). Dalhousie French Studies 34 (1996) -127

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