Pascal’s Proemial Tropes

Pascal’s Proemial Tropes Richard L. Barnett . . . la préface la plus codée, celle qui n’a rien à dire, et le dit [...] fait voir le rituel dans sa nudité formelle en même temps qu’elle court et concourt à sa propre perte [...] le préfaciel est par définition un discours qui va vers son annulation.... —Jean-Marie Gleize1 I N A RADICALLY PARADOXICAL AND INCONVERTIBLE SENSE, all signification deriving from Pascal’s Pensées hinges irrecuperably on the provisional, unstable framework in which such matter is cast. Rooted in errantry, indefatigably itinerant and forever wayfaring, the Pascalian enterprise is at once dismantled by the very vagrancy which concurrently legitimizes and reifies its being. The strug­ gle to inhere is staged, self-styled, always in and of the margins, a quest —deflected, regressive. To peer beyond the grid is to encounter peripherality , hiatus. Fragments compell incompletion, sustain unwholeness; heedless ellipses everywhere erupt in defiance of systematization; vacant interstices supersede marks of closure. Alas, as though at every turn, endlessly and sweepingly, proleptic metaphors engage in a process of frenetic obliteration. The very pre-conditions of sequentiality are thus countered. And so, Pascal’s oft iterated promise of inaugurality, of liminality and, by extension, of methodical succession subsists, if at all, as a premonitory token of deceit, a self-subverting prognosis, a ceremonial sign, as it were, of the very disembodiment of order which it is summoned to textualize. Ultimately, we post-dated destinataires must glean from this disunion of unconsolidatable gropings none other than the matter that it is, which it only can be: a kind of disarrayed blueprint of scattered segments and untended lineaments, a diffused topos of autoreferential marginalia. But if we glean only “ this” and no more, how does such matter mean? Pascal’s Pensées play with prescription, grope painfully, we adduce (and so they tell us), for cohesion, for union; and yet it is from such failed quest, from the act of quest itself, perhaps too, from the dis­ articulated triumphlessness of it all that such textual construct, in its fullfledged patchiness and however irrevocably dissymetrical, is engendered. Vol. XXVII, No. 3 39 L ’E sprit C réateur Neither initiatory nor terminal, without origination or consummation, inveterately de-centered, the Pensées wobble tentatively in an ill-defined, ever resuscitated entre-deux. Displacement is all. Each segment, each chunk of thought, each piece of every strapless bundle “ placé sous le signe d’une double indétermination,” 2 is prefixed and suffixed by all others and, invertedly enough, by none but itself. In this so crucial respect at least, the text is paradigmatically neutered, homologized, democratically un-hierarchical. Disrythmia, with all the unfixed resonances it brings to bear, proves over-riding. For the initiated reader of French classical texts, none of this messyness strikes as novel. One need only to have perused the ever so elusive essays of Montaigne, flirted with the addling aphorisms of La Roche­ foucauld, or flipped through the portraity passages of La Bruyère, even through the testy tales of La Fontaine to discern the distortions wrought by all patent epithets conventionally applied to the art of classicism. In each of the aforementioned it is indeed rupture and disjunctiveness that over-determine poetic signification. But the Pensées further conflate and complexify textual issues: for if, faithful to kind, such provisionality, innured uprooting, refusal to take shape, to adopt contour, to induce order bespeak a status not so peculiar to the Pascalian universe, here—by a twist all the more equivocal—the “ matter” spoken is recurrently and ineffacably that of “ order,” of exposition. To be sure, Pascal’s is a work that strives to simulate—from within—its own prefaciality, a work which semiotically embraces in effect sequential markers which never come to be, expositional ciphers and ingrown pre-texts that invoke an absent exposition. Unfailingly, the markers stand alone, writhe in solitude, drift on in a kind of inverse absentia of presence, proffering none but them­ selves. Meta-textual and auto-critical, these are the signs of a narcissistic tropology.3A kind of prefatory mythomania underwrites and authorizes, as it were, a non-script, the fundamental scriptlessness of the...