What Is There to Say? (review)

Book Reviews Ann Smock, What Is There to Say? Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. 208. Speech is the ostensible topic of What Is There to Say?, but it would, I think, be equally accurate , and perhaps more revealing, to say that the book is really about the rhetoric of paradox, and that what is at stake in it is ultimately a matter of style. Smock uses the term speech for lack of a better word to designate a mode of communication that is understood to go on around, behind, beneath or even in spite of what is actually said (or written): essential speech, that is, speech stripped of such superfluities as words. Thus the central question posed in the book contains an apparently irresolvable paradox: "What is it that must be said but not the only way it can be? What is it that must be said but only the way it can't be and without benefit even of this must?" (vii). This question, inspired by Maurice Blanchot, is explored in penetrating analyses of works by some of Blanchot's contemporaries well known for having similar preoccupations (Beckett, des Forêts, Paulhan, Duras, and Weil) and also, perhaps surprisingly but also tellingly, in works by Herman Melville (Bartleby and Billy Budd). Smock's paradoxical definition of speech signals a deeper devotion to paradox that characterizes all of the principal themes she explores. Thus weakness can be understood as a form of strength (30), innocence a form of unbearable guilt (62), and suicide a way to suppress the very transgression it accomplishes (15). In the same way, Jean Paulhan's opposition between terror and rhetoric is "irreducible [although] each pole keeps proving after all to be the other" (41), Billy Budd "had to say he was innocent, which he could only do by condemning himself (60), and Bartleby, far from refusing assignments, refuses even to refuse. By focusing on such enigmas, turning them over and over, and juxtaposing them in various ways, Smock is able to open these texts up like paper flowers, making them more accessible to readers but without imposing onedimensional readings on them. The goal of her method, again inspired by Blanchot, is not to resolve the paradoxes, to explain them away, but precisely to keep them open, as a way to explore aspects of the human condition that are usually passed over in silence (although, as Smock repeatedly reminds us, we tend to talk about them, or at least around them, without cease). AU of the texts studied here dramatize a moment in the communicative process, drawing it out to unheard of lengths in order to emphasize the frustratingly approximative nature of all our attempts to make ourselves understood. This is the moment at which style intervenes. By attempting to make up for our apparent inability to say what we really mean, style becomes a form of content, a way to address the ever-present threat of vacuity while giving form to that very threat, along with our desire and/or obligation to overcome it. It is this moment of hesitation in the communicative act, and literature's ongoing struggle to fill the gap, that fascinates Ann Smock. In these circumstances, paradox is not a difficulty to overcome but a space to inhabit, the space, to borrow again from Blanchot, of literature. Eric Prieto University of California, Santa Barbara Marie Bornand. Témoignage et fiction: les récits de rescapés dans la littérature de langue française (1945-2000). Genève: Droz, 2004. Pp. 252. En dépit de ce que laisserait supposer son sous-titre, l'analyse de la littérature des camps proposée par Marie Bornand se concentre non seulement sur la parole des rescapés mais également sur celle des témoins indirects. Bornand opte effectivement pour une acception élargie du Vol. XLV, No. 3 113 ...