Ethical Tempo of Narrative Syntax: Sylleptic Recognitions in Our Mutual Friend

In inventing the Victorian novel with Pickwick Papers (1836), Charles Dickens — trailing clouds of Augustan wit as filtered and aerated through eighteenth-century comic fiction — has his inebriated hero, risen to the heights of attempted rhetoric in an impromptu speech, fall “simultaneously” (19: 254) into a wheelbarrow and sound asleep — as if to say, passing at once from public view and out. Syllepsis: that figure of speech in which, typically, a predicate is understood in two different senses with separate objects, whether indirect or direct. In Pope, well before Dickens, the tea that you take when not counsel can stain your new brocade if not your honor.

Syntactically, the twinned temporal prongs of the sylleptic effect are not “simultaneous” exactly, as Dickens would have it — the opposing meanings do not coincide “at once.” Beyond any mere doubleness of literary ambiguity, syllepsis requires the textual come-again, often an ironic comeuppance, a backtracking. In its narrow miss of grammatical nonsense, syllepsis is for the most part lightly comic (with, as we shall see, notable exceptions). Its almost punning tendency results from the fact that such a rhetorical turn works only if it is discernible enough to catch hold, and be caught, in a tactical double-take.

Laughing matters aside, one can see why Derrida recruited the term syllepsis, albeit loosely, to describe Mallarmé’s hymen entre as indicating both marriage and its prevention by maidenhead, consummated embrace and the barrier it must overcome. Two polysemous lexemes, hymen standing for marriage and the membrane and entre meaning “between,” are themselves wedded under syntactic duress.¹ In traditional syllepsis, spanning more than a single bipolar term, a good measure of the significance restlessly resides in the fact that correlated meanings of the same phrase do not quite fit flush in a conterminous grammar. What we read is the activity of designation in process rather than its cumulative results: the signifier is kept in syntactic motion on the track and trace of its bifurcated sign function. Rather than a Janus-faced pun, syllepsis is a forking in syntactic s/pace itself. Here is narrative temporality writ out and small, its signifying force not derived from content alone but from the drive of form.

To quote the actual text from Chapter 19 of Pickwick Papers, its hero “fell into the barrow, and fast asleep, simultaneously” — where, incidental to the syllepsis, one understanding of “fast” (as “firmly”) gets the jump even on its speedy temporal alternative. But for its main comedy the phrasing depends on the wavering of a preposition, like the betwixtness of entre in Mallarmé, a grammatical integer not replicated in the second phase of the predicate in this case — as it would have been if occasion presented itself to describe Pickwick no sooner falling into his bed than into a dream. Dickens is full of such sylleptic gear-shifts, with or without explicit lexical iterations. In effect, he borrows the banter of comic dialogue from his fictional predecessors and transfuses his own discourse with it, lending character to his own narration and narrative authority to the wit, however contorted.² By contrast, and by the protocols of quotation alone, a stagey and affected character in the first major English novel of the nineteenth century, Lady Delacour in Maria Edgweworth’s 1801 Belinda, deploys such phrases as part of her pose of mannered sarcasm. These frequently include the recurrence of a prepositional form, where a seeded idiom like “out of my mind” is parsed so that “out” goes two ways at once, by way of distraction and extraction: “I had been swindled out of my senses, and out of my dower” (Edgeworth 40). As the plot later thickens, she nudges along its disclosure through secondary report with a double “with”: “I am absolutely overcome with heat — and with curiosity” (121). Only her nemesis, the disreputable Mrs. Freke, caught in a mantrap when spying on her, pushes the trope further toward Dickensian grotesquerie in insisting “that ’tis better for a lady to lose her leg than her reputation” (311).

As taken up in their more boldly disconcerting forms by...