SOURCE: "Caught in the Dialogic: The Célinian Narrator Silenced," in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 107, No. 4, September, 1992, pp. 795-805.

Introduction

Dialogism's emphasis on an interplay of voices is grounded in Bakhtin's conception of the word as social material. Because "all words have the 'taste' of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour," the notion of a word of one's own becomes impossible. Privacy and the word are incompatible in a way that recalls Geertz's view of culture as a symbolic system that can be characterized by its public nature. Although Bakhtin affirms everywhere in his writings that all words belong to the public domain (this is, after all, dialogism's most salient characteristic), nowhere does he explore the dynamics behind a textual subject's relationship to culture. Therefore a fundamental question remains unanswered, one that comes directly out of his work, but is never addressed therein: What happens to the relationship between culture and dialogism when a subject is forced into discursive marginalization by another voice in a text? How is dialogical activity problematized when the self is litera(ri)lly invaded by an other?

To begin to examine this issue, it is useful to locate where the mutual attraction resides between culture and the word. Geertz's view of culture suggests we start by looking closely at Lacan's concept of the Symbolic Order. Because it is precisely the place where desire is rearranged and laws are erected in order to allow a subject access to language, the Symbolic Order can be regarded as the place where culture and the word intersect.

If Lacan's theory is going to be useful in helping us get at the problematics of dialogism, it must be noted that while the Symbolic Order is the place where a subject gains entry into language, it is also the place where a loss occurs, in view of the subject's mediation through an other necessary to the process of acquiring language. How does dialogism account for the acquisition of language as well as the loss of self? I argue that this question can be answered by projecting the Symbolic Order on to a spatial plane, imagining it as an area possessing both a center and a periphery, with the center giving full primacy to the public and the word, while the periphery designates virtual isolation and alienation from language.

Enlisting Lacan to contend with problems of dialogism is an idea that emerged from a reading of Céline's Voyage au bout de la nuit. The loquacious narrator Bardamu, despite his remarkable manipulation of language, remembers his travels to Africa and becomes entangled in a colonial discourse that he is unable to master. He undergoes a discursive decentering so complete that the narrative voice, known for its skill with words, is ultimately silenced. Bardamu, in resisting culture as it is embodied in the Symbolic Order, becomes a marginalized subject as he moves farther and farther away from the center of the Symbolic Order. When he arrives at what I have conceptualized as the periphery, he is left without a voice. To understand how he copes with this prospect of an endangered relationship to the word, the role of the other (on whom the subject depends for a definition of self) needs to be foregrounded.

In Céline's text the other incarnates the "public" from which the subject grows increasingly isolated as it approaches the boundaries of the Symbolic Order. Despite conflict between the two, the subject actively goes in search of the other. This complicated dynamic between self and other grows so intense that the subject must actually do violence to the silence he suffers in order to ensure dialogical engagement in the realm circumscribed by the Symbolic Order.

Bardamu's stay in Africa represents the only time in the novel when he is without language; the episode functions as a key textual moment that positions him at the periphery of the Symbolic Order. I shall demonstrate that when the self is forced into discursive marginalization by an other, when it is pushed to the limits of the Symbolic Order, from a dialogical perspective, the narrator suffers dramatic consequences.

The Narrative Voice: Colonizer Turned Colonized

Bardamu's marginal cultural position in the Symbolic Order is revealed in his confrontation with colonialism in Africa. Sent to man a tiny provisions store in the jungle, he has difficulty adjusting to the colonial behavior that his fellow countrymen slip into so effortlessly. Before arriving at his own little store deep in the jungle, he stops in a town where he observes a fellow countryman exploiting a group of natives. He nervously describes how this French entrepreneur takes complete advantage of an African family wishing to sell a basket of raw rubber. When the entrepreneur pays the family by wrapping a dirty handkerchief around the neck of one of the children instead of giving them a few coins, Bardamu comments: "La famille sauvage contemplait à présent le petit orné de cette grande chose en cotonnade verte … Il n'y avait plus rien á faire puisque le mouchoir venait d'entrer dans la famille." Although he appears cynically indifferent to the incident, Bardamu does, in effect, demonstrate his complicity in an imperialist discourse. For just as the child wears this symbol of civilization around his neck, so too does Bardamu occupy the voice of the ethnographer, a role that authoritatively describes the handkerchief's introduction into the family as if he understood the natives' symbolic systems.

The ethnographic voice assumed here by Bardamu silences the other. For when the bewildered family leaves the store, their lack of understanding is interpreted in the text as silence. Discursively, Bardamu embodies what Said terms "the power of culture," a force that maintains its stronghold "by virtue of its elevated position to authorize. The power of culture is an agent of, and perhaps the main agency for, powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it too." Bardamu's voice is legitimized, and "powerful differentiation" is brought to a dramatic climax when he ends the scene with a description of the African father receiving "un grand coup de botte en plein dans les fesses" from the shopkeeper. Literally kicked out of the shop, the native sets into relief Bardamu's own inside position, both in the shop and in the authoritative discourse of colonialism.

Bardamu is firmly ensconced in the Symbolic Order, for colonialism owes its discursive strength to the Symbolic Order's function as the place where desire is repressed and laws erected. But Bardamu is not at all prepared for what will happen to him when he leaves the entrepreneur to run his own shop in a remote corner of the country. His place in the Symbolic Order, which up to this point has guaranteed him access to language, is about to be overthrown. It is in the tiny village of Bikomimbo that the constitution of the subject becomes a completely traumatic operation.

We have seen that Bardamu's unwillingness to recognize the natives as a legitimate other allows him to appropriate a colonial discourse that silences them. One might think that by denying the natives a voice, he simultaneously denies himself an addressee, thereby compromising his position in the Symbolic Order. Curiously, however, the natives in Bikomimbo do not threaten his secure position in the Symbolic Order; instead, a westerner very much like himself encroaches upon his space in the Symbolic Order. In Bikomimbo he meets up with his alter ego Robinson, the character that he unexpectedly keeps running into throughout the novel and actually begins to seek out. We shall see that what Bardamu has done to the natives, i.e. silence them discursively, Robinson will do to Bardamu. The disturbing confrontation between Bardamu and his alter ego Robinson propels discourse in a centrifugal direction so that in the end Bardamu is left completely voiceless, as silent as the natives he portrayed only several scenes earlier. Before proceeding further, it would be useful to examine how the concept of silencing an other involves the co-opting of discursive space.

In a study of nineteenth-century travel writing about Africa, Mary Louise Pratt explains that the narrating western voice codifies the other because the "eye/I" that looks and speaks "commands what falls within its gaze." Houston Baker comments that her conclusions demonstrate "a writing of the 'Other' out of relationship to his or her native ground and into the sexual, commercial voyeuristic fantasies of imperialism." Bardamu's narrative is undoubtedly a product of the power of this ethnographic "eye/I" and is dialogically engaged with it. However, an important difference is that Bardamu never wishes to impose himself on the native. He is there not because of an active desire to participate in the colonial apparatus, but rather, like many colonists, in self-exile from France. He does not possess "the will to intervene" that characterized the travel writing explored by Pratt. She explains that this nineteenth century "will"

emanates from an unknown site behind the speaking 'I'—behind the periphery of what is seen, from a seat of power that should probably be identified with the state,[…] the current conception of state [being] a form of public power separate from both ruler and ruled, constituted most basically by the exclusive right to exercise legitimate violence within a certain defined territory.

In the previous scene in which the native family is "kicked out" of the shop, Bardamu simultaneously accepts and resists the colonial "eye/I." He accepts it insofar as he allies himself with the petty colonial entrepreneur and thus feels he should view the situation from his perspective; but he resists it in that he is uncomfortable interpreting a world he himself does not comprehend. Therefore Bardamu is forced to adopt the privileged voice that Pratt calls the "eye/I" at the same time that he enters into conflict with it.

Bardamu's discomfort with the western monopoly on discourse suggests that he is also ill at ease with the traditionally western concept of blackness as a sign of absence, negation, and silence, as explained by Henry Louis Gates in Figures in Black. Bardamu, the colonialist cum deserter, writes about Africa, the continent shrouded in a myth of darkness. Maintaining resistance to the ethnographic authority behind the "eye/I" means he must also penetrate this darkness. Doing so requires confrontation with the "Signifying Monkey," who, Gates explains, is "he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language." In other words, in the jungle where Bardamu will meet his alter ego Robinson, he is surrounded by others (i.e. the natives) who, like him, also function on the margin. This is likeness intensified. In Bikomimbo Bardamu will thus literally see versions of himself everywhere. Colonial exploitation performed by Bardamu at the level of theme thus occurs in discourse as well. A close reading of the scene itself will reveal how the feeling of oppression that accompanies exploitation is discursively played out.

Robinson, starved for interlocutors, consistently reads Bardamu's thoughts, forces Bardamu to listen to his longwinded pronouncements about the natives, and exploits Bardamu's presence to keep talking. Bardamu finds him disturbing, and although he writes "Je cessai de converser avec ce forban," it becomes obvious that Bardamu seeks to appropriate the self-assured status represented for him by Robinson's voice, even though he is simultaneously afraid of it.

The animals in the vicinity of the hut make so much noise that Bardamu writes: "On en finissait par ne plus s'entendre entre nous dans la case. II me fallait gueuler à mon tour par-dessus la table comme un chat-huant pour que le compagnon me comprît." By substituting "chat-huant" in the original French expression "gueuler comme un veau," Bardamu plays with a cliché and, consequently, a traditionally secure position in the Symbolic Order. Moreover, reduced to an animal-like state, verbal communication begins to fade between them, an indication of his increasing distance from the center of the Symbolic Order.

Bardamu, becoming desperate in his need to shed some light on the fast approaching darkness, asks his predecessor: "Comment vous appelez-vous? N'est-ce pas Robinson que vous venez de me dire?" Bardamu doesn't understand him the first time, and never receives an answer the second time. This unfulfilled desire to know Robinson's name, to be able to assign the primary signifier to a referent amidst all this confusion, dramatizes Bardamu's now more than ever questionable relationship to discourse.

His connection to the Symbolic Order deteriorates as both the outside noise and Bardamu's own inability to understand Robinson grow stronger. Even the simplest metaphor on the part of Robinson throws Bardamu into a discursive situation that the latter is apt to misunderstand.

Vous n'avez pas du coton pour vos oreilles? me demanda-t-il encore … Si vous n'en avez pas, faites-en donc avec du poil de couverture et de la graisse de banane. On réussit ainsi des petits tampons très bien … Moi je veux pas les entendre gueuler ces vaches-là!

Il y avait pourtant de tout dans cette tourmente, excepté des vaches, mais il tenait à ce terme impropre et générique.

Focusing on the alter ego's language, Bardamu, a master with words, tries to create a superior position for himself by drawing attention to this particular use of "vache." However, by reading Robinson literally, Bardamu demonstrates his inability and/or unwillingness to deal with the highly valorized rhetorical device of metaphor, a sign that he has difficulty coping in the Symbolic Order. Moreover, he reinforces his vulnerability to the presence of this alter ego so that semantic play takes on threatening overtones.

Bardamu is lost because he misreads his alter ego. Discursively, his position has become so unstable that he even discards a literal understanding of Robinson's words in favor of a symbolic reading of the latter's advice to use earplugs. Bardamu writes:

Le true du coton m'impressionna subitement comme devant cacher quelque ruse abominable de sa part. Je ne pouvais plus m'empêcher d'être possédé par la crainte énorme qu'il se mette à m'assassiner là.

Paranoia grows so intense here that Robinson's advice is portrayed in terms of a plot against Bardamu, who even goes so far as to use the word "assassiner." Bardamu's suspicion of this resourceful combination of banana oil and animal hair demonstrates his unwillingness to "stick Africa in his ear." Unlike the fantastic Rabelaisian play with this part of the body, Bardamu's paranoia about tampering with his ear demonstrates a rejection of all that is playful in language in order to keep every line of communication open. In his desperation, Bardamu requires a more direct link with language, one that can assure him the decisive orientation of the Symbolic Order rather than the misorientation suggested by his inability to reconcile his body with its surroundings (witness his resistance to Robinson's advice to use earplugs).

Confronting his alter ego in the jungle has resulted in the desire for guaranteed communication, that is, communication without mediation. Robinson's subversive earplug advice requires Bardamu to shut out communication entirely while what he desires more than anything in Bikomimbo is the opposite. Robinson advocates transgression of the rules of the communicative act as it is embodied in la parole intermédiaire; but Bardamu, throughout the story admittedly less daring than his alter ego, does not have the courage to block the receiving end of an enunciative act so that he may sleep undisturbed. He is too sensitive to language to plug his ears. If Bardamu transgresses in the way he plays with conventions of language, he resists going so far as to transgress its very properties in terms of enunciative positions. If "transgression is both positive and desirable," if "it breaks, frees, opens, makes possible fictional construction and reconstruction, and guarantees authentic literariness," then Robinson's presence in Africa causes Bardamu not to see a reflection of himself in the alter ego but rather to engage in a confrontation with his writerly self.

Is it any wonder, then, that Bardamu's dilemma turns into one concerning being heard/read? When he explains anxiously: "Mais que faire? Appeler? Qui? Les anthropophages du village?… Disparu? je l'étais déjà presque en vérité!," the reader is actually the only one who can recognize his predicament because Robinson is gone and Bardamu does not deem the natives acceptable as illocutionary partners. Even though he rejects Robinson's advice to use earplugs and therefore stop listening, Bardamu himself is not listened to because no one can hear him from his position in the jungle.

One might assume that Bardamu's connection to the Symbolic Order is problematic because of the conflict he experiences with the only one who can guarantee him an entry into language, i.e. the alter ego Robinson. I shall demonstrate, however, that it is because of Robinson that Bardamu's confrontation with his writerly self calls into question his relationship to the Symbolic Order.

For if the Symbolic Order marks the point at which the subject gains entry into language, then Bardamu appears to be teetering on the edge of such a space. Does his peripheral position in the Symbolic Order suggest then that he is not subject to the division of self that accompanies any entry into language? Can Bardamu be considered a unified subject exempt from the "negative imperatives" that characterize the Symbolic Order as a site of disconnection and repression?

In order better to answer this question, it is useful to return to Pratt's concept of the "eye/I." It was demonstrated earlier that Bardamu both accepted and resisted this imperialist position; now, however, the western ethnographic voice no longer attempts to describe its surroundings. Instead, the "eye/I" seeks recognition by an other.

The pivotal moment in the African episode occurs at this point: Robinson disappears without a trace in the middle of the night, his absence affecting Bardamu's search for an addressee. Bardamu is debilitated by the very fact that the power of his western language is now superfluous in the jungle. Without an interlocutor to guarantee communication, Bardamu lacks the proper environment for an enunciative act. If the natives were silenced as others, Bardamu is himself silenced in the jungle because he refuses to accord them any illocutionary rights. We learn that he ends up being discursively assimilated to the natives:

Les noirs petits et grands se décidèrent à vivre dans ma déroute en complète familiarité. Ils étaient réjouis. Grande distraction. Ils entraient et sortaient de chez moi (si I'on peut dire) comme ils voulaient. Liberté. Nous échangions en signe de grande compréhension des signes.

Bardamu and the natives communicate exclusively through nonverbal signs. But we soon learn that he cannot abandon language for silence. He grows feverish, and in his delirium decides to set on fire the hut in which the natives feel at home. The smell of burning rubber reminds Bardamu of when he was a small child in Paris witnessing a dramatic fire at the telephone company. Should it come as a surprise that the memory of burning telephone wires in France is triggered by his attempt in Africa to put an end to a hated enunciative situation? Like the telephone company fire, signs exchanged with the natives represent a threat to language. This episode opened with the abuse of an African family as they tried to sell a basket of rubber to a western entrepreneur; the scene ends with Bardamu, desperate for the western voice of his alter ego, setting the same material on fire. At the beginning when the family selling rubber is mocked by westerners, Bardamu is planted firmly in the Symbolic Order; by the end, when he is silenced by the absence of a western other, he has been pushed to the edge of the Symbolic Order so that it is now he himself who sets fire to the very material that introduced him to Africa.

Conclusion

Bardamu's status as a subject with regard to his now marginal position in the Symbolic Order raises an important question. Do we conclude that he is not a split subject because he has moved away from the censorship necessary to keep the Symbolic Order functioning smoothly? I would argue that the Symbolic Order's drive to reorganize and repress desire in a way that culture is then produced keeps Bardamu very much on the inside of the boundaries of the Symbolic Order. Bardamu and the natives do communicate by signs, but where the natives have their own language and culture, Bardamu is dispossessed by the loss of a western interlocutor, the other without whom there is no self. He is denied verbal communication and, positioned at the edge of the Symbolic Order, is left discursively homeless.

The natural reaction is therefore to leave Africa and go in search of Robinson who, as alter ago, holds out the only possibility of identity for Bardamu. The Symbolic Order, as the promise of a move towards language, becomes the mechanism by which Robinson's status as reified other silences Bardamu. When Jameson speaks of the Symbolic Order's power to humiliate the subject, one can look to the role of the western other embodied here by Robinson to see how it operates. Pushed to the limits of the Symbolic Order, Bardamu sets fire to his silence in order to regain language. The consequence of this destructive act is to pursue the other that is Robinson, thereby deciding Bardamu's status as a split subject unable to survive without the Symbolic Order.

Bardamu embodies the Symbolic Order's characteristic trait of continually ensuring the infinite division of the subject within culture, the guaranteed separation of self from other. Juliet Flower MacCannell notes that the modus operandi of the Symbolic Order is just this, that it "reminds us that the drive of culture is neither benevolent nor malevolent; it is a mindless, inexorable drive towards division, splitting. It is aimed, but only at producing, through this fission, the energy and the power to perpetuate itself."

The energy so vital to the Symbolic Order derives its heat from the "warm[th]" inherent in the tensions of the dialogical word. Bakhtin's work on dialogism has made possible this analysis of alterity in culture as it is represented by the Symbolic Order. Throughout his writings he speaks of the "boundary," perhaps nowhere more eloquently than in the following statement:

The realm of culture has no internal territory; it is entirely distributed along the boundaries, boundaries pass everywhere, through its every aspect, the systematic unity of culture extends into the very atoms of cultural life, it reflects like the sun in each drop of that life. Every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries: in this is its seriousness and its significance; abstracted from boundaries, it loses its soil, it becomes empty, arrogant, it degenerates and dies.

The emphasis Bakhtin places on the importance of boundaries to dialogical activity has been held up to a different light in this reading of Voyage au bout de la nuit. When examined discursively in Céline's text, the edges of the Symbolic Order's "drive of culture" resound with properties that define the ensnaring space of dialogism.