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Syllepsis
Michael Riffaterre
625
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626 Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis
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Critical Inquiry Summer1980 627
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628 Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis
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Critical Inquiry Summer1980 629
points out that the grammar prevents the reader from choosing between
hymen as "marriage," a symbolic union or fusion, and as "vaginal mem-
brane," the barrier to be broken through if desire is to reach what it
desires. Undecidability is the effective mechanism of pantomime as an
art form since from mimicry alone, without words, the spectator cannot
tell whether a dreamed, or a remembered, or a present act is being set
forth. This, in turn, Derrida shows to be fundamental to Mallarme's
concept of poetry. It is simply a pun or, as Derrida prefers to call it, a
"syllepsis,"'the trope that consists in understanding the same word in two
different ways at the same time, one meaning being literal or primary,
the other figurative.10 The second meaning is not just different from
and incompatible with the first: it is tied to the first as its polar opposite
or the way the reverse of a coin is bound to its obverse-the hymen as
unbrokenmembrane and as a breakingthroughof the barrier. The fact that
hymen is also metaphorical in both its meanings is irrelevant to its un-
decidability. What makes it undecidable is not that it is an image but that
it embodies a structure, that is, the syllepsis.
To the three types of intertextuality I have listed above there corre-
spond three different roles played by the syllepsis. With the complemen-
tary type, the syllepsis itself suffices to presuppose the intertext and
by itself conveys the significance. With the mediated type, the syllep-
sis refers to the textual interpretant. With the intratextual type, the
syllepsis symbolizes the compatibility, at the significance level, between a
text and an intertext incompatible at the level of meaning.
The complementarytype.-Mallarme's hymen illustrates syllepsis gen-
erating this type of intertextuality. It is rare, however, to find two
normal, current meanings of the same word activated simultaneously.11
Yet a word may have only one meaning and still be turned into a syllep-
sis. For that to happen it suffices if the context's lexicon has semantic
features opposable to the semantic features of the word. For instance,
Derrida's own metalanguage builds upon undecidability a commentary
on the wellspring image in Paul Valery's poetry-not the picturesque
wellspring, the natural forest fountain that is no more than a synecdoche
for the traditional locus amoenus; this spring is a metaphor for the origin
of a work of art, for an opposition between the poet's "I" and the "not I,"
the universe he is describing. Whereas that universe exists for the I, starts
between desire and its realization, or between an act committed and the memory of it";
here and elsewhere, my translation unless otherwise cited. Derrida's commentary, "La
Double Seance," has been rpt. in La Dissemination, pp. 199-317; see esp. pp. 240 ff.
9. See La Dissbmination,p. 249.
10. This definition has prevailed ever since Dumarsais' treatise, Des Tropes (Paris,
1730). That syllepsis must be distinguished from the so-called grammatical syllepsis or the
zeugma is apparent in Heinrich Lausberg's Handbuch der literarischenRhetorik (Munich,
1960), pars. 702-7; on the acceptation chosen by Derrida, see pars. 7-8.
11. See La Dissimination, p. 310 n.63.
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630 Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis
existing when the poet gives it expression, "the I, the exception to and
the condition of everything that appears, does not appear itself."12 Source
must therefore be defined as the borderline between water and "no
water." Instead of using this awkward negative compound, Derrida
pretends to find a syllepsis in an existing (perfectly unequivocal) word
which he transforms into an undecidable word: "le mot source: origine
d'un cours d'eau, de-part et point-d'eau, locutions qui sont tout pres de
virer, de faCon nullement fortuite, vers les figures de la secheresse, du
negatif et de la separation."'3 Phrases about to veer away, literally: on the
verge of turning about or changing color. And that does indeed define,
or rather create, undecidability, and it does indeed produce a kind of
figurative code (in the sense of figurative versus abstract art). The
negativization of the French word source is not to be confused with pe-
joration. Pejoration would yield a dried-up well or a brackish spring-or
perhaps a snake in the fountain. Here we have only a glimpse of truth
through the complementary negative of what has been stated-the
translation of philosophical discourse into the language of echoing con-
notation: into poetic discourse.
Which leads me to a narrower scrutiny of what Derridajoyously says
about his own pun: this pun is by no means fortuitous. This puzzled me
at first because I was doing a linear reading, that is, I was assuming that
Derrida read point d'eau as a lexeme with two reversible or interchange-
able sememes, an obverse "spring" and its reverse, "no water." This
would be a sort of semantic coupling-now you see it, now you don't-
which I knew full well had to be his decision to fool or seduce the reader
by punning on point ("point") and point ("no"). He could not possibly
think that point, within a water context or within a compound word,
could turn into a negative.14 But the reader stops puzzling and can only
marvel with Derrida at the resources of language, for his pun is not
gratuitous. It makes explicit a presupposition of point d'eau; it actualizes
the word's natural intertext because point d'eau in its "spring of water"
meaning is actually inseparable from drought and accommodates a der-
ivation leading to "no water." Indeed, the French point d'eau does not
belong to the same descriptive system as the regular word for spring,
source. Whereas source may appear in the mimesis of nearly any setting
and is surrounded by associations like fresh water, coolness, rushes,
12. Derrida, "Qual quelle," Marges de laphilosophie (Paris, 1972), p. 334; cf. p. 339 n.8.
13. Ibid., p. 333: "the word 'wellspring': origin of a watercourse, point of departure
[Derrida separates root and prefix with a hyphen to emphasize the cutoff] and point d'eau
[in French point d'eau is literally a spot where water wells up from the ground; but out of
context, if we take point as the old-fashioned, emphatic negative adverb, point d'eau can be
read as "no water," and this authorizes Derrida, though only just barely, to go on as
follows:], these are turns of speech about to veer-and absolutely not by accident-toward
images of drought, of negativity, and of separation."
14. Point in point d'eau is a noun and therefore must be preceded by an article; point
the negative adverb cannot take the article. Hence the completely different syntagmatic
distributions for the two.
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Critical Inquiry Summer1980 631
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632 Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis
ble nonetheless is a kind of literary accolade bestowed upon it: the reader
sees it as a reference to a textual interpretant of its own, a Mallarme
passage once again. Indeed, the blow is called a coup de donc17 ("the blow
struck by therefore")-so we have a pun stacking one expression on top
of the other: first, an auditory metaphor, coup de gong ("gong stroke");
second, the adverb that best summarizes deduction, donc ("therefore")
--donc/gong; and third, an oblique allusion to the title of Mallarme's prose
poem, Igitur, Latin for donc, which, once translated, slips easily into the
mold of Mallarme's use, in another title, of coupde dis ("roll of the dice").18
The trouble with the eardrum metaphor, however, is what Derrida
himself remarks on: the logic of its representation, its logic as mimesis.
How can any sound break through the eardrum and still be heard?
Logically, philosophy should be deafer. Once the coincidentiaoppositorum
of the hymen image is inserted into that of tympan("eardrum"), the solu-
tion is provided by a mediating interpretant, the parallel text of excerpts
from the poet Michel Leiris' autobiography, Biffures.19 These form a
narrow column running along Derrida's text-a significant margin that
conveys meaning, instead of the white barrier of an ordinary margin
(another oblique allusion to the opposing functions of hymen). In that
text Leiris describes melody, especially the operatic voice, as a steel blade
piercing the listener with pleasure-an obvious phallic image that takes
on the dual aspects of hymen. And better yet, Leiris uses two images for
his dreaming upon the inward convolutions of the ear: a tiny bug, the
earwig, commonly called perce-oreille (literally, "ear-piercer"); and Per-
siphone, the Greek Proserpine, goddess of the dead. Leiris rationalizes
this name as "piercing" and "phone"("voice") and speaks of the voice
descending, like the goddess herself, into the Underworld, the "deeper
subterranean reaches of hearing . .. where the caves still echo the faint-
est murmurs."20 Thus the two complementary features of hymen are
transferred to tympanthrough Leiris' image. If we are to read the "Tym-
pan" text correctly, that is, with a logic not of its metaphor but of what
Derrida's reasoning might be if expressed literally, we must interpret it
intertextually. Tympan, then, presupposes Mallarme's hymen, or rather
Derrida's commentary on it (the intertext), while Leiris' interpretant
gives the reader guidance, as it were, mapping out the path that leads
17. Marges, p. xxv.
18. Coup de dis, then, is like a further interpretant connecting a "stroke ofigitur" and a
"stroke of donc." See Mallarme, Igitur; ou, La Folie d'Elbehnon,Oeuvrescompletes,pp. 433-43.
Without laboring the point, we can say Igitur's coup de dts coincides with the gongish stroke
of midnight, and Mallarme comments upon it as if it were a symbol of undecidability:
"Minuit sonne-le Minuit oui doivent etre jetes les des. . . . Igitur . . . fait le geste. In-
difference .... L'infini sort du hasard [Midnight strikes-midnight, the moment for rolling
dice. ... Igitur makes the throw. Indifference. Out of the random flows Infinity]" (p. 434;
see also p. 442).
19. See Jeffrey Mehlman's A Structural Study of Autobiography:Proust, Leiris, Sartre,
Livi-Strauss (Ithaca, N.Y., 1974), pp. 149, 113-17, 135-41.
20. Marges, pp. vi-ix.
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Critical Inquiry Summer1980 633
him from the essay's title back to the syllepsis. The significance of Der-
rida's essay remains lacunary unless we read it along with Leiris'
marginal text. Similarly, coup de donc, as a pun on coup de gong, continues
to look less than felicitous as long as we do not see that it is "verified,"
"justified"-that is, motivated-by its Mallarmean interpretant.
The intratextualtype.-A perfect, if complex, example of this type is
Derrida's baffling book Glas ("Death Knell").21 Glas is an enormously ex-
panded commentary on Hegel that proclaims itself a monument to
intertextuality, divided as it is into two texts. The left-hand column on
each page is a direct paraphrase of Hegel; the right-hand column is at
once a paraphrase of Jean Genet and a spin-off from the Hegel column.
I am examining Glas also because the book is offered as a fragment: it
begins with the truncated end of a sentence and ends with the unfinished
beginning of a sentence. And yet, paradoxically, intertextuality does
impose upon this fragment the closure or clausula without which it
would be hard to distinguish between text and discourse.
The truncated start of Glas, "quoi du reste aujourd'hui, pour nous,
ici, maintenant, d'un Hegel? .. . Ces mots sont des citations [anyway-or
anyhow-what is Hegel for us here, today? or: What is a Hegel the way
we see things here and now? ... These are his words I quote]," alludes to
Hegel's criticism of the idea of sense-certainty: Can we acquire absolute
knowledge from sensory experience? Hegel begins with an analysis of
the meaning of the pronoun "this" (German dies, French Ca), which we
use to point to what we imagine is reality. Hegel divides it into its seman-
tic components "Here" and "Now" and finds them equally difficult to pin
down:
[Let's] take the "This" in the twofold shape of its being, as "Now"
and as "Here." ... To the question: "What is Now?" let us answer,
e.g. "Now is Night." ... We write down this truth; a truth cannot
lose anything by being written down. ... If now, this noon, we look
again at the written truth, we shall have to say that it has become
stale.22
21. Derrida, Glas (Paris, 1974). For commentary on Glas, see Geoffrey Hartman's
"Monsieur Texte: On Jacques Derrida, His Glas," Georgia Review 29 (1975): 759-97; his
"Monsieur Texte II: Epiphony in Echoland," Georgia Review 30 (1976): 170-94; and Jef-
frey Mehlman's Revolution and Repetition (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 105-7.
22. G. F. W. Hegel, Phenomenologyof Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), par. 95,
pp. 59-60.
23. Glas, p. 291.
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634 Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis
been dreading all along is starting all over again (or, more literally:
"is already appearing again." This minor image is borrowed from
the language of publishing: "is already in its second printing.")
Today, here, now, the fragment left over from]
The book ends the way it started, back at square one of the game. In
between, the critique of sense-certainty runs through the parallel glosses
on Hegel and Genet. Just before he lets the book trail off into a repeat of
the initial sentence, Derrida describes periphrastically what Geoffrey
Hartman calls a "laborious phallic erection as just another-yet an-
other-raising up (re-leve), equivalent to the re-telling-re-publishing
(re-edite) alluded to in the next and last sentence of the book."24 How-
ever valid the phallic interpretation may be, I think we must first take it
for what it says it is: an erection in the monument or edifice sense-the
construction of an Egyptian obelisk:
C'est tres aride, sur l'esplanade immense, mais Cane fait que
commencer, le travail, ici, des maintenant. Des que Cacommence a
ecrire. Ca commence a peine. Ne manque plus qu'une piece.
(a grince. Roule sur les troncs d'arbre couches. Poulies. Les
cordes graissees se tendent, on n'entend qu'elles, et le souffle des
esclaves plies en deux. Bons a tirer. Fouet cinglant du contremaitre.
Regain de force liee. La chose est oblique. Elle fait angle, deja, avec
le sol. Remord lentement son ombre, sire de soi.25
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Critical Inquiry Summer1980 635
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636 Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis
bal, lexical bridging like that on the first page of Glas, where a variation
on one verb saturated both columns. The two-columned page becomes a
single page once more. The Mallarmean fold is closed, the pli, Mal-
larme's basic image for the structure of the book-page piled on top of
page-an image Derrida likes to play with.26 Better yet, since here the
left- and right-hand columns, punningly connected, are not on the same
page but on facing pages, the folding up shuts the book. Again, and still
better, take another step: since this fold was first unfolded by the dis-
semination of the book's first sentence into a Hegel and Genet text and
now folds back, the last words at bottom right of the last -page, by taking
up again the first words at top left of the first page, in effect reduce to
naught the whole mass of the book's intervening three hundred pages.
They are all just a gloss on that initial sentence. And with exemplary
circularity the gloss itself has brought us back full circle to its first exam-
ple too, since the erection of the obelisk illustrates the folding over, the
shutting of the book, because the image resumes the first comments on
Hegel, quoting from his Esthetik on India's phallic columns and Egypt's
giant statues. In so doing, the obelisk plays, curiously, the same role as
Jean Cocteau's image of the factory smokestack repeated at start and
finish of his film Le Sang d'un porte. The first shot in the film is of the
smokestack beginning to crumble; the last shows its total collapse. Which
is to say the whole movie in between, with its long dream sequences and
its plot involvements, all really took only a few seconds of objective time;
the dreamer's subjective imaginary experience has given it duration. So
it is with Glas, the book-length Talmud of a very short Hegelian dictum,
inserted by the reader into the narrow slit between the Here and the
Now into which Hegel divided This. Or else the whole of Glas equals the
"and" conjoining the two instances of This.
It is obvious from the above that the letter to the publisher and the
obelisk tableau are non-sense in a linear reading (in which case, tirer
would be the trope contrary to the syllepsis, namely, the antanaclasis-
repeating the same word but with different meanings). The letter and
the tableau make sense only together, in a comparative reading, and
there would be nothing to dictate such a reading if it were not for the
undecidability of bonsa tirer and for ungrammaticalities that corroborate
the effect of the syllepsis on the reader and further insure that he will
read the two texts together and interpret them as two variants of one
invariant. There are such ungrammaticalities. They even provide fur-
ther objective proof that the obelisk does indeed complement (redite)or
reeditethe letter and is a metaphor for the return to the book's beginning.
First this: that the obelisk, centerpiece of the Egyptian scene, remains
unnamed. This disappearing act would be passing strange if the subject
of the description were really an exotic tableau. In truth, however, the
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Critical Inquiry Summer1980 637
obelisk is merely the figurative substitute for Hegel's ca, and thus stamps
with a final image the circularity of Glas, rolls up the scroll of exegesis
upon that pronoun. The text says so: "Ca grince, Case penche [This is
creaking, this is about to fall]." But actually the clincher must be a curi-
ous contradiction in the Egyptian scene: "Ca commence a peine. Ne
manque plus qu'une piece [This has hardly started. (At first glance,
"this" must mean the job of erecting the monument.) Only one piece is
missing]." If the work is just starting, how is it only one piece is missing,
unless that piece be both the essential one and a simple one within a
simple mechanism, unless it be our missing pronoun? And lo and be-
hold, the pronoun is missing: "Ne manque plus qu'une piece" has been
shorn of its subject. This subject should have been the neutral il; not il as
pronoun for a person-noun but a mere grammatical abstraction for the
third person, a mere tag for a function and hence an apt symbol for the
universal Dies in Hegel's German, Ca in Derrida's French.
Second corroborating ungrammaticality: the paronomasia on
redite-redoute(Derrida confessing his fear that when the whole Glas has
been gone through, everything will have to be said over again) simply
dramatizes Hegel's own dispirited statement. Having demonstrated that
the universal is attained through the negativizing of particulars, of the
multiple Heres and Nows, Hegel remarks: "natural consciousness, too, is
always reaching this result, learning from experience what is true in it."
But then, almost sadly, he adds: "it is always forgetting it and starting the
movement all over again."27 This sense of helplessness is exactly echoed
by Derrida just before he quotes Hegel's letter telling his publisher he is
going to repeat himself; and again when Derrida speaks of advancing
slowly, painfully, along a gallery of images, a gallery of things, of particu-
lars, to reach at last the Sa, S-a, "savoir absolu" ("absolute knowledge")-
that is, ca (this) translated into "universal" code by means of a pun.
Slowly, painfully indeed, since the "gallery" of phenomenological
stopping points is compared with the stations of the cross. Thus
the text is derived a second time from the tirer syllepsis, now through
the translation of the syllepsis into a "depression" or "obsessive fear"
code. The derivation confirms once again that the significance of
the syllepsis is, first, that it functions as a clausula and, second, that it
makes sure the reader correctly interprets that clausula as an analogon
of the incipit.
To conclude, I shall modify (the better to adapt this trope to the
concept of undecidability) the definition of syllepsis as follows: syllepsis
consists in the understanding of the same word in two different ways at
once, as contextual meaning and as intertextual meaning. The contextual
meaning is that demanded by the word's grammatical collocations, by
the word's reference to other words in the text. The intertextual mean-
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638 Michael Riffaterre Syllepsis
ing is another meaning the word may possibly have, one of its dictionary
meanings and/or one actualized within an intertext. In either case, this
intertextual meaning is incompatible with the context and pointless
within the text, but it still operates as a second reference-this one to the
intertext. The second reference serves either as a model for reading
significance into the text (e.g., point d'eau read as "no water" in a text
where it should mean "water," and seems to) or as an index to the
significance straddling two texts (e.g., tirer as "reendeavor," halfway be-
tween a reference to reprinting and a reference to an engineering
feat).2s Thus undecidability can exist only within a text; it is resolved by
the interdependence between two texts. And now for a final rephrasing
of my definition: Syllepsisis a wordunderstoodin two differentwaysat once, as
meaning and as significance. And therefore, because it sums up the duality
of the text's message-its semantic and semiotic faces-syllepsis is the
literary sign par excellence.
28. Bons a tirer cannot be interpreted as a metaphor since there is no content common
to the subverted and subverting meanings (no ground, in I. A. Richards' terminology; no
shared semes, in semantic parlance).
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