Nothing but the Truth: The Case of Pierre Rivière

CAROL TENNESSEN Nothing but the Truth: The Case of Pierre Riviere Q Do the manuscript which you have handed to me and the composition on which you have been engaged since your interrogation on the ninth day of this month contain nothing but the truth? A Yes. Q There are some facts which you have not mentioned in your memoir .. . Second interrogation of Pierre Riviere (18 July 1835)' Contemporary thinkers as diverse as Michel Foucault and Erving GoHman are no longer confident that a sign can exchange for meaning; that is, they suggest that we can no longer look at words as trustworthy substitutes for the 'real' objects and situations to which those words supposedly refer. This is not to say that narrative accounts are unrelated to reality but rather to warn us that the meaning of those accounts is always closely edited and SOCially constructed. Foucault tells us in The Order of Things that in the sixteenth century language and things were endlessly interwoven, but that this is no longer so. The age of resemblance , he says, is draWing to a close.' He argues, in particular, that while representation has always aimed at likeness, words and things do not resemble one another any more; therefore the written word - and I would add the spoken word as well - can no longer be a mark of the truth. Another writer whose work is much discussed these days, lean Baudrillard, also rejects the traditional notion that communication is simply a transfer of ideas or feelings or concepts, that is, of some kind of knowledge which is assumed to be real and to exist inside the speaker. Baudrillard claims that language doesn't just move from one point to another, but that it goes back and forth, reversing itseif continuously. He says that such language - he calls it circular discourse - describes a circle which takes in the position of the speaker and the person spoken to. Baudrillard's model of language works like a cycle in which positions (and voices) of dominator and dominated interchange. These new theories clearly call for a rethinking of the question of authority in language and, ultimately, the conventional true/ false distinction we have come to take for granted. If we can no longer locate the position of the sender and the receiver, then we cannot talk about transmitting, in the old sense of the term, any kind of authority from one UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 2 , WINTER 1987 /8 THE CASE OF PIERRE RIVIERE 291 point to another. Or pinpoint, for that matter, anyone voice which carries more authority than another or which is 'authorized' to speak the truth on a given subject. We have known for some time that the word of the 'eye' witness is suspect, to say the least - eyewitnesses were almost always for the prosecution anyway, Jean Genet once remarked. But equally questionable , I will suggest, are the words of 'expert' witnesses, our Western equivalent of certified truth-tellers. As a springboard for this discussion, I propose that we take another look at Foucault's study of a relatively obscure case of parricide in nineteenth-century France, the case of Pierre Riviere. The documents about this case, which were edited by Foucault and a team of scholars at the College de France, illustrate better than any other material I have found to date why it is no longer possible to take people 'at their word.' Indeed, by the time we have finished reading the various accounts of what actually may have beenat stake in this crime, we realize the futility of trying to take sides: we will never be able to choose between them. Here is persuasive evidence that discourses are social constructs and that there is not necessarily a correlation between what somebody says and a reality which pre-exists and authorizes any particular set of words over another. But there is a difficulty in this which must be addressed. If, following our review of the Riviere study, we acknowledge the possibility of multiple versions, all more or less true (or false), and if we also concede that a 'real' or 'correct' version will never be directly accessible to...