À propos des silences du texte narratif

• Main Author: Michel Morel
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2012-06-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: W. Iser; J. Joyce; interpretation; interruption; parataxis; reading
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/1349

This article studies the role of typographical blanks in four practices of fiction. In reference to Wolgang Iser’s conception of textual blanks, it brings together the great tradition of the nineteenth century (Thackeray in Vanity Fair and Dickens in Bleak House, and Joyce’s subversive ways in Ulysses) : on one side, the double example of interruptions according to instalment publication, and descriptive paratax, on the other, two inverted versions of stream of consciousness (paratax with generic modulations in the scene of the burial, and continuous syntax in Molly’s monologue). With Thackeray, chapters, paragraphs and sentences channel and force the reader’s interpretation ; with Dickens, paratax stages the scene and never stops surreptitiously working on his understanding of the text. As to Joyce’s two opposed modes, they demonstrate that end of phrase silences keep modulating our agreement or disagreement with what has just been stated, and more generally with the text as a whole. The four examples (the last one in absentia) thus lay bare typographical blanks as places of intense interpretational activity. Far from being voids one could discount, such silences are ordeals revealing the truth according to the text. They teem with latent interpretations that energize the act of reading.