[In the following essay, Herzberger analyzes how language functions in Goytisolo's Señas de identidad.He argues that “Goytisolo's literary language is not ‘new,’ as many have contended, only the contexts into which it is placed and the dynamic bi-polar movement that results.”]

Juan Goytisolo's fiction of the past decade and a half, as Goytisolo himself has often reminded us, is shaped to a large degree by his readings of the Russian Formalists and the Prague School and French Structuralists.¹ During this period Goytisolo's theoretical essays and metafictional ponderings on the nature of his narrative are informed by some of the most important principles of Formalist theory: emphasis on the linguistic material, on the “literariness” of verbal art; on intertextuality and the evolution of literature as a change of literary forms; on the distinction between non-literary language, whose aim is communication and whose being is transparent, and literary language, rooted in the concept of self-referentiality and opacity. Goytisolo's theory essentially eschews the artistic norms of postwar neorealism, with their focus on the outward circulation of social reality, and seeks instead to direct attention to the inward flow of literary discourse. He proposes, for example, that the novelist engage in “una búsqueda del lenguaje: de pasar la atención de la realidad exterior, de centrar la atención en la representatividad [y] poner la atención en el signo, es decir, en el sistema lingüístico.”² Furthermore, he insists upon the “autonomía del objeto literario: estructura verbal con sus propias relaciones internas, lenguaje percibido en sí mismo y no como intercesor transparente de un mundo ajeno, exterior.”³ These and a host of like assertions reveal how Goytisolo devises a narrative strategy in which language is both point of departure and destination, and how within this scheme the centripetal energies of the word invest literary discourse with a superior autonomy.⁴ For Goytisolo, as for the formalists, the language of literature has value as pure being, beyond all that it mediates and effects.

Goytisolo published Señas de identidad in 1966, a time when his novelistic theory was not yet fully defined. Nonetheless, he had already digested much of the formalist doctrine that would shape his later works, and the essential components of his new literary vision were firmly in place. Hence Señas has been accurately described as a transitional novel: it departs from the postwar tradition of social realism and points to the author's more radical experimentation to follow. Beyond its historical importance in Goytisolo's evolution as a writer, however, Señas has been recognized as a complex work of fiction capable of yielding richly diversified meanings when scrutinized at close range. Critics have credited it with destroying the myths of Spanish culture, with providing a link between Spain and the new novel of Latin America, with creating a new language for Spanish narrative, and with annihilating the sterile traditions of the past and postulating a new novel on the ashes of the old. Most critical thought on the novel tends to converge, however, at the level of language. For example, in his essay on Señas published in 1969 Carlos Fuentes asserts that “Goytisolo emprende la más urgente tarea de la novela española: destruir un lenguaje viejo, crear uno nuevo, y hacer de la novela el vehículo de esta operacíon.”⁵ Similarly, Juan Carlos Curutchet affirms that Goytisolo writes in a way “que al sublevarse contra los recursos del lenguaje tradicional, está simultáneamente pugnando por reinventarlo y devolver a la conciencia su poder reordenador de la realidad.”⁶ In much broader terms, Manuel Durán has discussed the problematic nature of Goytisolo's literary language and has traced its forceful evolution in Señas and La reivindicación del conde don Julián.⁷

A number of other critics have linked the innovative literary language of Señas to a self-referential language that defines not only Goytisolo's experimental narrative, but the so-called new novel in Spain as a whole. Robert Spires, for example, has argued that the recent novel is shaped by a “lenguaje autorreferencial” that culminates in Juan sin tierra,⁸ while Janet Díaz has observed that language “may become an end in itself” in the contemporary Spanish novel.⁹ From a somewhat different perspective, Michael Ugarte, drawing upon structuralist and post-structuralist theory, has shown how the intertextual dynamics of contemporary fiction focus attention on the literary text (words) and its relation to other texts.¹⁰ While I would not dispute the notion that language has helped to forge the new complexity of recent Spanish fiction, I would like to examine, from a modified formalist point of view, some of the problems suggested by the postulation of a new or self-referential language, and show particularly how these ideas inhere in Señas. A formalist approach is particularly useful in this instance, not because Goytisolo has pointed the way for us through his interviews and essays, not because he has declared, “I have been influenced by formalist poetics,” but because such a posture enables us to focus on certain aspects of a literary work that have to do with its aesthetic architecture and artistic materials.

The concept of self-referentiality in literature, as well as the centripetal energies of language that accompany it, is rooted in the dichotomy formulated by the Russian Formalists and Prague Structuralists between poetic language and non-poetic language (and, by extension, the language of any literary work versus the ordinary speech of everyday communication). This distinction can be found in the Russian Formalist writings as early as 1916, and in the Prague School treatises published before World War II. In the Prague School Theses of 1929, for example, the poetic/non-poetic dichotomy is explicit: “In its social role, language must be specified according to its relation to extra-linguistic reality. It has either a communicative function, that is, it is directed toward the signified, or a poetic function, that is, it is directed toward the sign itself.”¹¹ Likewise, Roman Jakobson, in his essay “Word and Language,” posits the poetic and non-poetic function of language as polar opposites—the referential function directs language towards non-linguistic contexts, while the poetic function directs the message towards itself.¹² More recently, Tzvetan Todorov has suggested a similar distinction: “la littérature, nous le savons, existe précisément en tant qu'effort de dire ce que le langage ordinaire ne dit pas et ne peut pas dire … C'est seulement à partir de cette différence d'avec le language courant que la littérature peut se constituer et subsister.”¹³ And with ringing derision Roland Barthes denounces the inuring familiarity of everyday discourse in favor of the more vital language of literature: “[In the language of the People] all magical or poetical activity disappears, the party's over, no more games with words: an end to metaphors, reign of the stereotypes imposed by petit bourgeoise culture.”¹⁴

From the early 1960s Goytisolo clearly echoes these ideas in his theory and seeks to exploit the preeminence of literary language as he goes about the construction of Señas. Yet the question remains, how do these principles function in the novel, if indeed they function at all? Is it in fact the dichotomy between literary and non-literary language that impels the innovative course of Señas and enables it to stand apart from social realism, as Goytisolo proposes?¹⁵ Or does some other literary principle on the level of theme or structure shape the novel? In order to explore these and similar questions, we must identify those elements of the discourse that constitute its new literariness and scrutinize the way in which they enable us to rediscover the referential system that the novel appropriates and transforms.

Goytisolo begins Señas with the nosotros form of narration, without punctuation, as the official voice of the Spanish government and press:

Instalado en París cómodamente instalado en París con más años de permanencia en Francia que en España con más costumbres francesas que españolas incluso en el ya clásico amancebamiento con la hija de una notoria personalidad del exilio residente habitual en la Ville Lumière y visitante episódico de su patria a fin de dar un testimonio parisiense de la vida española susceptible de épater le bourgeois conocedor experto de la amplia geografía europea tradicionalmente hostil a nuestros valores sin que falte en el programa de sus viajes la consabida imposición de manos del santón barbudo de la ex-paradisíaca isla antillana transformada hoy por obra y gracia de los rojos semirrojos e idiotas útiles en callado y lúgubre campo de concentración flotante … ¹⁶

That is to say, the novel opens with a kind of language that might easily be identified as non-literary. In numerous other instances as well, Goytisolo specifically inserts everyday, non-poetic language into his narrative. To identify only a few examples: fragments of conversations at a bar; the language of a pompous lawyer; the vapid commentary of an academic lecture; police surveillance reports; conversations in French, Spanish, and Catalan among a variety of characters; brief biographical sketches of Spanish immigrants. All of these “styles” of language have at least one thing in common—they are what Russian Formalists would categorize as non-poetic discourse, whose principal function, we must remember, is not to call attention to their linguistic essence, but rather is to communicate. However, by the very fact that this non-literary language appears in a literary context, does it somehow become literary discourse through a sort of poetic alchemy? Does language surrender its role in service of communication and abruptly refer primarily to itself? There is no simple answer to these questions, of course, but we might say that it both does and it does not.

Within the structural pattern of the novel these styles become part of a bi-modal sequential process: first, contextualization and recontextualization through constant and varied juxtapositions; second, the emergence not of a communication/self-referential dichotomy, but of what Paul Ricoeur has aptly termed a split reference.¹⁷ That is to say, in order for us to attend to the complexity of meanings of the literary text, we must be willing to suspend the reference proper of a descriptive word or phrase, which in turn creates “the negative condition for the emergence of a more radical way of looking at things.”¹⁸ The stereoscopic vision that finally obtains both abolishes and preserves the literal sense of the discourse. For example, we recognize the pompous language of the lawyer (98–104) or the wearisome conversations at Madame Berger's cafe (chapter five) because we have some familiarity with the context in real life from which each is engendered (i.e., the words are impressed with meanings derived from common experience). However, Goytisolo recontextualizes this style of language—he takes it out of its normal context—so that our perceptions of it become de-automatized. The lawyer's pronouncements are framed by cemetery scenes from Professor Ayuso's burial in which epitaphs from tombstones are offered in Spanish, Catalan, German, and English (97–98; 104–107). Hence we are compelled to see anew the vacuous commentary of the lawyer, since its immediate literary context suggests death and futility on the one hand, and the authentic spirit of political rebellion on the other (Professor Ayuso). The discourse now opens up to us certain aspects of political dissidence that had previously remained concealed (in this instance, the narrative becomes an instrument of demythification). The language is by no means “new” here, but rather transformed into a parody of itself. It is language reflecting back on itself not by turning away from what it was in the world, but rather by gaining a polysemism through its contact with other contexts and styles of language within the literary discourse.

A similar type of transformation occurs with the first-person plural language of the Press/Regime. It takes on literary meaning and becomes defamiliarized because of a structurally motivated split reference. In the first place, it directs us within the text of the novel not to reality itself, but to a linguistic conception of reality as it is formulated by the official press. It refers to a language that both creates a world and is in the world that it creates. This world (Spanish society), of course, is one based upon automatized perceptions that seek to preclude or annul conflicting perspectives. The language of the Spanish press as it is represented in Señas is aimed at creating what Victor Shklovsky, in another context, terms an “algebraic method of thought.”¹⁹ The words become fixed and static in the same way as the reality to which they refer. Language and meaning do not part company here, as Orwell feared. Instead, the decay of language is signaled by the overbearance of meaning that portrays the world as solidly incontrovertible. It is logocentrism with a tragic twist: outlines are blurred and details covered up.

Within Señas Goytisolo first proposes that we accept this language for what it is, and then reject it for what it does. Since the world invented and propagated by the press is formulary and reductive, its purpose is to obliterate perceptions that are spontaneous and complex. For Goytisolo language functions as an instrument of the writer's refusal to accept life as it is. Hence his attack against Spanish reality begins by laying bare the automatized language that controls and shapes that reality. He appropriates the language of the press and places it in a literary context that first exposes, and then contradicts, its intention. He suppresses punctuation so as to invest official language with a monotonous drone, and then frames it in a larger context with the diverse and creative use of metaphor, with the subjective and intimate meditations of the protagonist, and with a variety of devices that serve to undermine a single, rigid view of the world. Since ambiguity, rather than specificity, forms the basis of verbal art as Goytisolo seeks to practice it, his recontextualization of the newspaper language—as well as of conversations, lectures, etc.—serves to guide our perceptions in two directions: towards the word and towards the world. Both are crucial to the innovative nature of Goytisolo's writing. The former, because it makes us aware of the potency of language and the diversity of linguistic possibilities; the latter, because our renewed perceptions help us to rediscover the world. Or as Paul Ricoeur proposes: “[our renewed perception] reveals, unconceals, the deep structures [not only of language], but of the reality to which we are related as mortals who are born into this world and who dwell in it for a while” (151). Hence as we observe at close range the language of Franco's culture, we see as well the way in which that culture can be redefined by a subversion of its linguistic intent.

The conjunction of literary and nonliterary discourse functions in a like manner in the final part of the novel. For example, the fragment at the beginning of chapter eight is narrated in the “tú” form, without punctuation, as Alvaro peers at Barcelona through the telescope on Montjuich. What he sees, of course, is a physical landscape transformed dramatically by the demands of industrial society for growth and development: “nuevos tanques de petróleo tinglados modernos depósitos de hulla las obras de construcción de un silo gigante la grúa del tramo de prolongación de la escollera una lancha rápida americana … edificios leganñosos jardines cipreses restos de chabolas buldozers brigadas de obreros el parque las torres vetustas del estadio inútil el envejecido palacio de la Exposición barracas en ruina nuevas chozas farolas plateadas avenidas el campo las afueras más humo más chimeneas más fábricas” (399). The images that appear before his eye trigger a painful process during which Alvaro first assimilates and then withdraws from what stands before him. As occurs frequently in the novel, the embedded social criticism moves to the fore here as the images amass and unite to reveal the destruction of Alvaro's culture.

Equally important, however, is the metamorphosis of the linguistic landscape. Over the next several pages, juxtaposed to Alvaro's view of the city, instructions are introduced in several languages on how to use the telescope, and fragments of conversations of French, Italian, and English tourists are inserted. In addition, there appears in the midst of these two sections a lengthy segment from a tourist pamphlet (written in four languages, but reproduced in the narrative in Spanish) describing Barcelona and its history (400–02). The straightforward use of nonliterary language in these instances is more complex than it seems at first glance. While in normal usage the phrases are limited to a single linguistic level (instructions, information, etc.), the literary meaning they gain here depends upon their immediate context and the relation they bear to Goytisolo's portrayal of linguistic norms as a whole. The instructions on page 399 and the conversations from pages 402 and 403, both presented in several languages, are linked directly to the transformation of the physical landscape that Alvaro observes only a few pages earlier. Goytisolo in effect disengages this language from the world of speech and injects it with new meaning within the context of his discourse. The words of the tourists are not merely innocuous snatches of overheard conversations, but rather objects that inhere in the structure of physical and cultural violation that Goytisolo has set out to portray. They are matter to be scorned in the same way as the buildings that have strangled the city and effaced its identity. Similarly, because it is framed by these segments, the tourist pamphlet shows how the Spanish language, in alliance with the foreign invasion, is used to abridge culture and rid it of its complexity and richness. Hence the sterility of official language, already established in the portrayal of the press, tells us less about Barcelona—as it is intended to do—than about the reductivist efficiency and mythifying power of words when co-opted to serve the aims of the government.

Another example of how Goytisolo removes language from its customary context and places it in unexpected configurations has to do with the program from the fiesta at Yeste. The introduction of the program into the narrative (126–27) would at first glance seem to be inspired by the most ardent imitative zeal. It is reproduced, word for word, line for line, as it might logically appear in extra-literary reality. The program announces four days of activities, all part of the official celebration of the town of Yeste, which culminates in a typical running of the bulls and a “grandiosa novillada, cuyos pormenores se anunciarán en programas especiales” (127). In order to forge literary meaning out of this document, to compel us to see how it functions more than merely to publicize a cultural tradition, Goytisolo distorts the apparent linguistic intent and transforms it into a structural device identified with oppression and death.

Twenty pages after it is reproduced in its entirety, fragments of the program reappear in the narrative (148–49). This time, however, they are interpolated into Alvaro's stream of consciousness as he recalls his interrogation by the police following the bullfight announced in the program. These two references to the program frame the most violent and dehumanizing segment of the novel, in which the slaughter of rebellious workers at Yeste in 1936 is paralleled by the killing of a bull at the fiesta in 1958. The link between the two acts of violence is explicit, and the social message clear.²⁰ Yet what Goytisolo has achieved through the introduction of a fiesta, with the subsequent massacre of its participants, compels us to see the announcement of the celebration in new light. The program is an official document, sponsored by the town government, in the same way that the events leading to the massacre represent the official actions of the government. The activities of the fiesta are announced on the program for certain hours of the day, just as the confrontation between the laborers and police is related with temporal precision. The program heralds the grandiosa novillada, but without details—in effect, the details are provided by the tragic death. But of the bull, or of the workers? In fact, the two become indistinguishable.

The identification of the program language with the interrogation of Alvaro further complicates the role of the program on two important levels. First, the linking of the government document with the police creates another level of meaning. As an official publication, the program is implicitly tied to censorship and oppression. Hence its intended message is perversely undermined. The announcement of the fiesta activities, already linked to death and violence, is now contextualized with the political control that has come to be identified with all official language (e.g., the press, the “diario de vigilancia”) represented in Señas. From the standpoint of aesthetics, the alternating segments of program and police language create a special form of textual defamiliarization. Their appearance within the narrative hinders the act of reading. The reader must pay closer attention to the text, thus both the difficulty of his task and the duration of his perception are increased. The juxtaposition of the two sets of words not only interrupts the flow of the narrative and compels us to focus on the words as words (i.e., they are foregrounded, in formalist terms), but also calls attention to deep and multiple meanings associated with them. Goytisolo in effect liberates the program language from the delimiting authority of form and injects it with new life amid the folds of political repression. Thus what at first seems to serve chiefly as a device to trigger Alvaro's involuntary memory, is integrated into the narrative and acquires literary value through the multiple meanings that come to be identified with it. Again, the referent is split: towards the world and the typical fiesta that it suggests, towards the text and the violent repression to which it is intimately linked—and ultimately to the commingling of both.

In addition to the fact that Goytisolo has told us extra-textually that Señas is a transitional work, and that it represents a profound break with certain novelistic precepts associated with social realism, there is also explicit evidence within the text of Goytisolo's rejection of recent literary tradition. Although he assails with malicious humor the Spanish novelist Fernández, who visits Paris and shows himself to be an illiterate fool (306–10), a more subtle attack on literary tradition occurs earlier in the novel. In the midst of a segment in which the narrative focuses on the empty rhetoric of Spanish exiles in Paris, the narrator alludes to a magazine founded by the group (though never published) and relates the materials listed in the table of contents. Among other things, the issue was to have included “algún ensayo amazacotado … en defensa del realismo, una mesa redonda (y plúmbea) acerca del compromiso de los escritores …” (257). He then offers a sample of “committed poetry” (258) written by an opponent of the Franco regime. What is important to understand here is that, ironically, the poem should not be viewed by the reader as a work of literature; its language is not to be seen as poetic. But how are we to reach this conclusion? If the language of the press can be transformed into literature, surely the language of poetry must be literary by its very nature. Again in this instance what becomes crucial is the contextualization of the poem. It is placed amid the empty rhetoric of dissent mouthed by the exiles in Madame Berger's cafe—a contrived rhetoric of fustian pretension which, as Goytisolo shows, has futilely sought to bring about social and political change in Spain. The interpolation of the poem at this point underscores the likeness between the two types of rhetoric—of the poem and the exiles—rather than affirm their difference. It thereby denigrates the explicit literary intent of the poem and reveals the vacuity of its literary and social substance.

The poem also hints at Goytisolo's scorn for the tradition of social realism as a whole. Its so-called committed stance has not only failed to inspire social change, but it has also engendered a simplistic literary language that is not at all literary. Its mechanical patterns of expression are denotative and sterile (as are those of the Franco regime) rather than ambiguous and complex. And by contextualizing it within the rhetoric of sterility fashioned by the exiles, Goytisolo degrades its poetic pretense and underscores its literary existence as either barren or stillborn. The insertion of the poem also suggests Goytisolo's view of the nature of literary evolution. In order to bring about change, a writer must vitiate the linguistic presuppositions of the prevailing literary norms as they grow insipid and stale. Only then can there exist a dynamic literary dialectic capable of reshaping our perceptions both of the world and of literature itself. The language of social realism, in contrast, is shown here to sound without resonance. It is devoid of literary value and serves only to reinforce the status quo. It must therefore be held up to ridicule and to parody; it must be destroyed and refashioned in a new mold.²¹ At the same time, however, it must be pointed out that, despite its apparent insipidness, the poem does not affirm an inherent disparity between literary and non-literary language. On the contrary, the entire episode shows how a single instance of language can function in one way or the other, defined always by the possibilities offered by its textual setting.

Throughout his theoretical writings and metafictional commentary of the past two decades Goytisolo has scrutinized the way in which language functions within the literary process. To a large extent he draws upon the formalist principle that opposes literary to non-literary language as he articulates the norms that have shaped his fiction since the publication of Señas. As a transitional work Señas has been judged to affirm the major tenets of Goytisolo's new literary vision: insistence upon the self-directed energy of narrative discourse and renunciation of the aesthetic traditions of social realism. Yet what Señas comes to tell us about language is something quite different than the author posits in his theory. Rather than “un lenguaje autorreferencial,” with its implied hermeticism that closes off the world, Goytisolo affirms in Señas what Ricoeur terms the “productive and projective” function of fiction. It produces a unique world that lives only in the individual work, and also projects this world into our own so that we may perceive “deeply rooted potentialities of reality … that are absent from the actualities with which we deal in everyday life” (153). Hence Goytisolo's literary language is not “new,”, as many have contended, only the contexts into which it is placed and the dynamic bi-polar movement that results. Indeed, Goytisolo's novels since Señas can be understood fully only if we reject his theoretical intent of creating an autotelic text and focus instead on split referentiality and the roots of the text's polysemism. To approach Señas from a perspective that fails to take this into account, and to insist upon a self-directed/referential dichotomy within its discourse, is to miss the aesthetic and social substance of the entire enterprise.

Notes

1. Goytisolo acknowledges in an interview with Julio Ortega that, “La convergencia de Benveniste y el formalismo y estructuralismo … ha influído … en el camino de ruptura que inicié con Señas.” (Revista de Occidente, 45 [1974], 16–28)

2. Juan Goytisolo, “Declaración de la mesa redonda celebrada en la Universidad de Wisconsin-Parkside” (Norte, 406 [1972], 91–96).

3. Juan Goytisolo, Juan sin tierra (Barcelona, 1975), 312.

4. For a detailed examination of Goytisolo's narrative theory see my “Toward the Word/World Conflict: The Evolution of Juan Goytisolo's Novelistic Theory,” in Perspectivas de la novela (Madrid & Chapel Hill, 1979), 103–113.

5. Carlos Fuentes, “Juan Goytisolo: La lengua común” in La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico, 1969), 78–84.

6. Juan Carlos Curutchet, “Juan Goytisolo y la destrucción de la España sagrada” (Revista de la Universidad de México, 1 [1969], 9–14).

7. Manuel Durán, “El lenguaje de Juan Goytisolo” (Cuadernos Americanos, 11–12 [1970], 167–79). Christian Meerts also addresses the problem when she claims that for Goytisolo, “Au commencement était la parole. En effet … le vrai problème d'Alvaro et finalement le seul auquel l'oeuvre renvoie, c'est celui du langage,” in Technique et Vision dans Señas de identidad de J. Goytisolo (Frankfurt, 1972), 53.

8. Robert Spires, “El nuevo lenguaje en la nueva novela” (Insula 396–97 [1979], 6–7).

9. Janet Diaz, “Origins, Aesthetics, and the ‘nueva novela española’” (Hispania 59 [1976], 109–117).

10. Michael Ugarte, Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo (Columbia & London, 1982).

11. Cited in Mary Louise Pratt, Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington, 1977), 8.

12. Discussed in Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago, 1979), 141–57.

13. Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction a la Littérature Fantastique (Paris, 1970), 27.

14. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York, 1975), 38.

15. In her perceptive essay, “The Poetic Language Fallacy” (in Towards a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, 3–37), Mary Louise Pratt shows that the opposition between poetic and non-poetic language has, in fact, never been proven; that it was assumed to exist by the Russian Formalists, but that such key Formalist concepts as “palpableness of form, estrangement, foregrounding, and the laying bare of devices” have never been shown not to exist outside of literature. In short, she suggests that there are no data from extra-literary discourse to support the dichotomy. I do not propose in any way to resolve this conflict here, but some of the issues suggested by the debate are relevant to the question of innovative and self-referential language in Señas.

16. Juan Goytisolo, Señas de identidad, 2nd ed. (Mexico, 1969), 9. Future references to Señas are to this edition and noted in the text.

17. Paul Ricoeur, “The Metaphysical Process,” 151.

18. Ricoeur, 152.

19. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, eds. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Neb., 1965), 11.

20. For a discussion of this section and its socio-historical implications, see Linda Gould Levine, Juan Goytisolo: La destrucción creadora (Mexico, 1976), 60–63.

21. Jean Tena addresses this issue from a somewhat different perspective. In her essay “De l'historique à l'imaginaire: L'exil et la quête dans Señas de identidad,” she affirms that Goytisolo breaks with the language of the past, but she is more concerned with the intertextual consequences of this break: “Mais l'essentiel est sans doute la rupture qui mène d'un language encore traditionnel mais finalement rejeté, à une forme presque lyrique, résolûment polysémique … C'est encore l'utilisation d'une écriture qui peut s'appuyer non plus uniquement sur la réalité, mais aussi sur une écriture antérieure par le biais de l'intertextualité” (Imprévue, 2 [1980], 97–119).