Parole, personnage et sujet dans les récits littéraires de Benjamin Constant (review)

Parole, personage et sujet is a linguistic analysis of Benjamin Constant’s four fictional and autobiographical narratives, Amélie et Germaine, Cécile, Ma vie, and Adolphe. Its aim is to demonstrate that, contrary to claims that Constant’s work exposes the failure of language to express authentic subjectivity, his narratives in fact explore and celebrate the richness of subjective expressivity. Not that such expression is without serious difficulty; the author acknowledges that the subjectivity of narrators and protagonists in these works is often blocked and thwarted. The back and forth between linguistic frustration and expressive success is the index of a crisis of the modern subject in the post-revolutionary age. But the work is nonetheless unified by Constant’s struggle to master the crisis by narrating it and in doing so creating an authentic life.

The author’s main analytic tool is Ferdinand de Saussure’s theoretical distinction between langue and parole. Langue refers to the basic code of any empirical language, the set of sounds and semantic constructs passively imposed on anyone who is born into or learns it. Parole is the individualized deployment of a language’s resources, which makes it in contrast to langue an act of creative choice and intelligence. Parole is thus the test and proof of a subject’s freedom and authenticity. Each of the four main sections of Boutin’s book examines, in exhaustive detail, the different aspects of conventional or objective langue, on the one hand and individualized parole on the other in Constant’s narratives, showing how the latter ultimately structures all of them. In the first she demonstrates how Constant remains in control of each narrative through literary devices, such as prefaces and fictional letters outside the text proper, that oscillate between the objective facts of Constant’s life and its imaginative recreation. The second explores the uses of parole in the representations of narrator, protagonist, author and supporting characters, while the third examines its opposite, the multiple contexts in which conventional language smothers or prevents the emergence of free, autonomous subjects. The fourth catalogues the different ways in which parole appears in the narratives, in the verbal expression of desire, in letters, in bodily language, in action, even in eloquent silence. Her overall conclusion is that the four narratives ultimately comprise a single story, the story of a subject in crisis who wishes to speak authentically but who consistently fails (541); paradoxically, it is in the very telling of the story of failure that parole triumphs.

Whether or not the author succeeds in demonstrating this conclusion in a convincing manner is, however, problematic. A narrative of “fragmented striving to overcome” can plausibly be thought of as a unified narrative. But “striving” is a category of intention, and the author’s theoretical apparatus precludes a discourse of intentionality. The author herself refers to a “crisis of ‘parole’” that is, a crisis of language in which the personal mode constantly cedes to the language of convention. But why does convention have such constricting power? And why do subjects yield to it? In the introduction and conclusion the author refers to a socio-historical crisis in the wake of the French Revolution that created insuperable obstacles to autonomous subjectivity, but the text tells us nothing about it. Nor can it, given its approach. At one point Boutin approvingly quotes a critic who attributes the power of conventional language in Adolphe to the empty selves of its characters. (345) But a strictly linguistic analysis can tell us nothing about what that may mean psychologically, or why it came to be historically. An analysis that remains within the pure play of linguistic categories is necessarily both anti-intentional and a-historical, and while it may document the linguistic symptoms of a crisis can do nothing to either explain it or resolve it.