SOURCE: Avni, Ora. “Speech Acts.” In The Resistance of Reference: Linguistics, Philosophy, and the Literary Text, pp. 175-229. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

[In the following essay, Avni applies speech act theory to the story “The Venus d'Ille.”]

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground.

—Wittgenstein

SPEECH ACTS AND THE FIRST PERSON

Of the various aspects of language that analytical philosophy has explored, speech acts have proved the most readily adopted and adapted by literature. While the average critic or student of literature still considers theories of reference rather exotic, he or she is probably familiar with at least the rudiments of theories of speech acts. Many have limited their interest to Derrida's acerbic discussion with Austin and Searle. Others have tried to tap the theories and explore or exploit their usefulness for literary studies. I find it significant that the two areas of enquiry literary critics, linguists, and philosophers have shared extensively in the last twenty years—whether by choice or by accident—are the first person and speech acts, that is to say, two instances of language that deviate in some ways from common theories of reference and truth.¹ In order to include them in a comprehensive theory of language, the theoreticians have to address new problems, delineate new areas of investigation, and stretch or at least revise their general theories—hence the number of special chapters on the first person or on speech acts in works that purport to offer a general theory of language. (Frege, for one, lumps them together and warns that some aspects of the first person [the perception that I and I alone may have of myself] and some aspects of what has come to be called speech acts [e.g., the “force” of an expression] elude his enquiry into truth.²)

I do not think that the only feature shared by speech acts and I is their irregularity with regard to general theories, however. I am therefore not offering them as two randomly selected examinations of marginal cases or annoying exceptions. The endless literary and philosophical bibliographies on the first person alone would suffice to indicate that the relationship between subjectivity and language is at the heart of the study of both. Even though speech act theories are a relatively recent development in the philosophy of language, the general interest Austin's work has aroused (after all, he published only a handful of papers in his lifetime—hardly enough to explain his fame other than by attributing it to the centrality of his investigation and the exceptional sharpness of his insights and teaching) both in literature and philosophy testifies to the relevance of the problems raised by speech acts for a comprehensive theory of language.

Furthermore, the theoretical problems underscored by I and speech acts do not belong to two different sets of epistemological or hermeneutical problems: the major tenets of speech act theories or I are in fact identical. They fall roughly into three categories:

1. the centrality of the speaking subject

2. the importance of the present tense (now)

3. the importance of presence (here)

In chapter 4 the ape's odd speech situation underscored the difficulties experienced by “theoreticians” in attempting to relate these three points to the historical context provided by the story: elaborating a subject that would account for the continuity of consciousness (accounting for the past, memory, etc.) and for the discontinuity of loci (the Gold Coast vs. the space of the academy, for example). These categories are not to be confused with formal markers (either lexical or grammatical). Austin, for example, cites a series of performative utterances that do not formally conform to these three criteria. The sign dog may be understood to mean “I am warning you that there is here a dangerous (or potentially dangerous) dog”; the expression “you are guilty” to mean “I hereby find you guilty”; or “you will …” to mean “I order you to …”; and so on. He is quick to point out, however, that although their formal syntax does not seem to conform to those three criteria, all these utterances do in fact include a subject (an “I”), an implied present tense (now), and an indispensable presence (here) in their deep structure:

We said that the idea of a performative utterance was to be (or to be included as a part of) the performance of an action. Actions can only be performed by persons, and obviously in our cases the utterer must be the performer: hence our justifiable feeling—which we wrongly case into purely a grammatical mould—in favour of the “first person,” who must come in, being mentioned or referred to; moreover, if in uttering one is acting, one must be doing something—hence our perhaps ill-expressed favouring of the grammatical present and grammatical active of the verb. There is something which is at the moment of uttering being done by the person uttering (Austin's emphasis on the last sentence).

The “I” who is doing the action does thus come essentially into the picture.

Thus what we should feel tempted to say is that any utterance which is in fact a performative should be reducible, or analysable into a form, or reproducible in a form, with a verb in the first person singular present indicative active (grammatical). … Unless the performative utterance is reduced to such an explicit form, it will regularly be possible to take it in a non-performative way.³

Indexicals—and I in particular—are at work in performative utterances, whether or not these utterances happen to be felicitous. This chapter therefore pursues the line of questioning I broached in my examination of the first person but focuses primarily on the network of circumstances and contexts created by and within the stories and the theories we read, rather than on the codes they elaborate and the messages they communicate. Were we to borrow Jakobson's analysis of the six components of verbal communication (addressor, message, addressee, context, contact, and code) we would say that we tend to focus primarily on the addressor (the ultimate addressor being “I”), the addressee (the reverse image of the former, e.g., “you” vs. “I,” the academy in “A Report”), and the context.

One final note about this chapter before we proceed with our stories. While literary critics have often tried to adopt and adapt speech act theories, philosophers have not shown the same enthusiasm for literature and literary theory.⁴ When they try to relate the two fields, it is not so much to explore their possible interaction as to impose philosophical standards on literary texts. For instance, in Searle's essay “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” the subject and focus are not fictional discourse but logical status (note that even so, Searle addresses the “fictionality” of the literary text, i.e., its truth-value and not its literarity or its rhetoricity). The same can be said of Richard Gale's “Fictive Use of Language,” and Joseph Margolis' “Literature and Speech Acts” (which concludes with what is in fact its premise: “in the first place, the very conception of literature, poetry, fiction, metaphor, the styles and genres of literature cannot be explicated directly in terms of speech acts”).⁵ Furthermore, despite literary critics' interest in speech acts, they, too, generally concern themselves with the applicability of speech acts to literature.⁶ In this chapter (and more generally speaking, in this book), I examine the possibility of a two-way relationship: the expectation that philosophy will provide us with new insights into the workings of the literary text and, conversely, the examination and reevaluation of these theories by literature.

MéRIMéE'S “VENUS OF ILLE”

THE STORY

“The Venus of Ille” is the story of a wedding;⁷ we cannot go any further in our account of the story since to do so would compel us to speak about this wedding. What wedding? There seem to be two weddings in this story; yet there can be in reality only one wedding since, as Austin rightly points out, a wedding ceremony is a legally regulated conventional act: if the law states that bigamy is illegal, M. Alphonse cannot legally wed twice in the same day. Surely, “lots of things will have been done—we shall most interestingly have committed the act of bigamy—but we shall not have done the purported act, viz. marrying. Because despite the name, you do not when bigamous marry twice” (How to, 17). Which event is then the real wedding and which is the simulacrum, the false ceremony “without effect”? Which of the two wedding-events is “The Venus of Ille” about? This question is probably the closest we shall come to articulating what the story is “about.” Unfortunately, it is also precisely the question the story itself asks but leaves unresolved. “Which wedding?” immediately becomes “Which story?”

Let us try again. Since the uncertain narrative content of the story has thwarted our attempt to recount the plot, this time we shall begin our reading with the presentation of its characters. Our set of characters includes the narrator (an ironic Parisian archaeologist), M. de Peyrehorade (an amateur archaeologist), his son M. Alphonse (a good-looking young man about to wed, who seems to care much more about his title of village champion at the jeu de paume (a ball game similar to tennis) than about his future bride, Mlle de Puygarrig (the young woman in question, who has just inherited a fortune), and—here again we stumble. Shall we list among the characters the bronze statue of Venus uncovered by M. de Peyrehorade? But can a statue be a character? Certainly, if the story ascribes human features to it and makes it behave like a character. Back to the story then (but which story?). Does it really invite us to view the statue as a human being? If it does, then within the framework of the suspension of disbelief, M. Alphonse's wedding to the Venus is legal. We shall then know which wedding is the “real” one and shall be able to tell the story. But as we noted earlier, the story does not dispense the information necessary for us to decide whether the statue is intended as a character or as a mere object; or rather, as a truly fantastic story, it dispenses information of both kinds—which does little to abate our uncertainty. Our attempt, then, to introduce the reader to “The Venus of Ille” by listing its characters has gotten us off to a second false start.

Perhaps we should simply examine the facts: In the middle of a tennis game,

M. Alphonse threw his racket on the ground in a furious rage. “It is this cursed ring!” he cried, “which pressed into my finger and made me miss a sure thing.”

With some difficulty he took off his diamond ring, and I went nearer to take it, but he forestalled me, ran to the Venus, slipped the ring on its fourth finger [lui passa la bague au doigt annulaire] and retook his position at the head of his townsmen.⁸

When a man puts a ring (especially when it is a family ring dating “from the days of chivalry” and used for generations as a wedding band [“Venus” [“The Venus of Ille”], 251]) on a woman's finger on his wedding day, we may assume that the two are exchanging vows in a wedding ceremony. (For the sake of argument, we shall ignore for the moment the fact that the Venus is an inanimate object and therefore not a suitable candidate for a bride.) One may still object that the young man did not intend to wed the Venus; he only entrusted her momentarily with the ring he intended for Mlle Puygarrig, a gesture he could have accompanied with “Hold this for me, a minute, will you?” This objection ushers in the vexed problem of intentionality within the study of language and truth.

INTENTIONS (PART 1)

Austin's view of this problem within the framework of speech acts is clear: intentions (or the lack thereof) may be responsible for the infelicity of a speech act.⁹ It entails “abuses” only and not “misfires,” though. The distinction between the two is important: in the case of a misfire, our speech act will be null and void, as if it never took place; while in the case of an abuse, the speech act takes effect, but it is afflicted with a condition Austin calls insincerity. “I didn't mean to marry/bet/promise, when I performed the speech act by which I married/bet/promised” does not automatically void my marriage/bet/promise. Intentionality may well alter the way I subsequently conduct myself, but it does not affect the operation of the linguistic or social conventions that will eventually determine whether my marriage/bet/promise holds or not. If I have pronounced, in the appropriate conventional circumstances, the appropriate performative utterance normally recognized as marrying, betting, or promising, then I have married, bet, and promised. In this regard, Austin differs radically from other philosophers who wrote about speech acts; citing as an example Hippolytus' line “my tongue swore to, but my heart did not,” he comments:

It is gratifying to observe in this very example how excess of profundity, or rather solemnity, at once paves the way for immorality. For one who says “promising is not merely a matter of uttering words! It is an inward and spiritual act”! is apt to appear as a solid moralist standing out against a generation of superficial theorizers: we see him as he sees himself, surveying the invisible depths of ethical space, with all the distinction of a specialist in the sui generis. Yet he provides Hippolytus with a let-out, the bigamist with an excuse for his “I do” and the welsher with a defence for his “I bet.” Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond.

(How to, 10, Austin's emphasis)

The discussion of intentionality thus raises nonlinguistic problems. Even if a man's consciousness were perfectly transparent to his interlocutors; even if we could all agree on this person's real intentions; even if Frege's problem were solved and we could communicate our intention without fearing the indeterminacies of our linguistic expression; even if, as Mary Louise Pratt so judiciously notes, the Oxford philosophers had their way and could extend the language spoken by a “Boy Scout, an honorable guy who always says the right thing and really means it” to all cases in which language is spoken; even if all these conditions are realized, can we be sure that our interlocutor's intentions are all present to his consciousness?¹⁰ Can he be expected to know what he really intended? Could he not have intended more than one thing at a time? Even in its most simplified, unproblematic, and uncontroverted form, psychoanalysis has taught us that we may have motives and intentions that escape our consciousness at the time we act them out (slips of tongue and parapraxis are the most obvious).

An examination of Alphonse's intentions brings to the fore what is at stake here. He has just missed a couple of balls, and now all he wants is to get rid of the ring in order to improve his tennis game. It is 9:30 in the morning. He is all dressed up for his wedding. The family is supposed to get together for a drink of chocolate at 10:00, after which they will leave for the wedding. For the last half hour Alphonse, the village champion and pride, “well groomed, in a new suit, white gloves, patent-leather shoes, chased buttons and a rose in his button-hole” (“Venus,” 225) has been sitting the game out and watching his team lose. Finally he decides to save the day, throws off his coat, and joins the game. In the next half hour he has to win the game for his team, wash up, and change back into his groom's attire. Time is then a major consideration, an overriding priority. Alphonse has certainly no intention of marrying anyone before winning the game, let alone a statue (the narrator notes ironically Alphonse's commitment to the game and indifference to his bride: “I really believe that, if necessary, he would have adjourned the wedding” [256]). At precisely this point, Alphonse's behavior no longer makes sense: why does he unnecessarily waste his precious time? The narrator, who is standing next to him, offers to hold on to the ring, but no, Alphonse refuses, running all the way to the statue to slip the ring on her finger. Why does he take the long way? The urgency of this question is compounded by the crucial position of the Venus' fingers: “her right hand, raised up to her breast, was bent, with the palm inward, the thumb and two fingers extended, while the other two were slightly curved” (240). Three fingers are conveniently stretched out more or less vertically, like hooks, and two are bent, facing away from Alphonse and blocked by the palm of the statue's hand. If he absolutely must use the statue as a hook for his personal belongings, why does he not slip the ring on one of the three extended and easily accessible fingers? Why does he bother to put it on the finger that is bent and hidden away from him, behind the hand? Oh, but the bent finger is the fourth finger, the ring finger (l'annulaire, contains the word anneau, “ring”), the one on which a groom slips a ring to wed his bride; and indeed the most appropriate finger for the ring carrying the sempr'ab ti (ever thine) inscription, traditionally offered by the male Peyrehorades to their brides on their wedding day.

Yet we must not oversimplify and assume that Alphonse intended to wed the statue. Then again, we must also admit that there is enough evidence to suggest that such an intention entered into his odd choice. The fact is that causality cannot exhaust the relation between one's known intentions and one's actions, all the more so, since one may have more than one intention and that, together, these intentions may not amount to a neatly bundled conceptual whole. In an extremely telling and much neglected footnote, Austin interrupts his theoretical discourse of speech acts to wonder about the transparence of consciousness and messages. “A new language is naturally necessary if we are to admit unconscious feeling, and feelings which express themselves in paradoxical manners, such as the psycho-analysts describe.”¹¹If we have feelings or intentions unknown to us, and if these unconscious feelings and intentions manifest themselves in paradoxical linguistic forms, a new language is indeed needed, one in which the law of the excluded middle will no longer rule communication. That from a purely logical viewpoint such a language is impossible is undeniable, since each expression would then have in addition to its accepted meaning all the other unknown and unconscious meanings intended by unknown and unconscious feelings and thoughts, whether or not these meanings can logically coexist.

This last point raises two questions (which are really two sides of the same question): if I cannot know what I really want and intend, and if some interference (we may call it the unconscious) disturbs the truth value of my cogito, can I still discuss my linguistic performance in terms of intentions? And if my interlocutor experiences the same difficulties, who will respond to the illocutionary force of my utterance, her cogito, consciousness—or parasites? How, in my turn, am I to read her response? And what if I am given several responses at a time? Although there may be answers to these questions, it is clear that if any factor affecting discourse escapes the grasp of consciousness, the theoretician of language who hinged a theory on the mastery and transparency of consciousness will have to go back to the drawing board. Austin does not pursue the question further but lets the threat of a radical overthrow of language as he knows it hang on a foreboding “if.” Note that it is not so much language that the unconscious threatens (on the contrary, Freud has amply demonstrated that language serves the unconscious quite well), but rather a certain conception of language, one in which there is no room for ambivalence, misunderstanding, displacements, substitutions, and wordplay.

Psychoanalysis aside, we should not overlook the obvious: Alphonse is not made of flesh and blood; he is a paper character. He has no intentions except for his textual intentions. Whether or not such intentions make sense in our pedestrian world in which we neither fall in love with nor marry statues is irrelevant. The text ascribes to him just enough oddities that can be construed as possible intentions to fog our discussion of his “real” intentions. In fact, the more general framework of the text's intentions goes far beyond Alphonse's. Numerous mirror effects take place, alerting the reader to the crucial role the statue is meant to play in the chronicles of Ille and, more specifically, in the chronicles of the Peyrehorade family. The young bride is constantly compared to the Venus by the narrator (“Venus,” 252), Alphonse (255), and especially the old Peyrehorade, who sings a much acclaimed song at the wedding party, in which he tells of two Venuses, one white and heavenly (Mlle de Puygarrig), the other subterranean and black (the statue). If we add that despite his wife's superstitious concern, the old Peyrehorade fixed the wedding day for Friday—Venus' day—we may indeed wonder what the text's “intentions” are and whose wedding the story really intends to recount.¹² The doubling effects are intensified as we notice the strange resemblances between Alphonse and the statue. The young man is strikingly stiff and statuesque: “M. Alphonse de Peyrehorade stirred no more than a statue [pas plus qu'un Terme] in the midst of his parents' comings and goings. He was a tall young man of twenty-six, with beautiful and regular features but they were wanting in expression. … He was as stiff as a post in his velvet collar, and could not turn round unless with his whole body” (“Venus,” 231-32). Even the differences between the two remain symmetrical: his facial features are regular and beautiful but totally expressionless, while the expression of the Venus' face is exactly what strikes and haunts all who gaze at her.¹³ Whether the Venus and Alphonse are twins or each other's negative, they seem destined for a clash—or a union.

We may look for intentions even further. Studded with quotations (Molière, Racine, Lucian, Virgil), our story is a matrix of literary texts parasitizing each other. In writing “C'est Venus toute entière à sa proie attachée,” the old Peyrehorade is quoting Racine. We recognize here the formula for illocution, in saying X, I am doing Y, in which the second verb is the explicit performative. Inevitably, a citation summons the text from which it is taken and superimposes it on the main story, thereby creating multiple narrative and semantic planes, and generating meanings. In quoting Racine's Phèdre, for example, he is also bringing it to bear on “The Venus of Ille.” Since Phèdre is the story of a married woman in love with her stepson, it shares with “The Venus of Ille” a concern for the exclusiveness entailed by the marriage convention and the transgression built into a second love. It also addresses the referential confusions and mirroring effects of which the most obvious is the constant comparison between Hippolytus and Theseus, culminating in the scene where Phèdre confesses her love to Hippolytus as if he were a young and chaste Theseus (act 2, sc. 5). This effect highlights the various doubles in Mérimée's story. The theme of the monster (and the monstrous love) constitutes another motif shared by the two works: not only because of Hippolytus' murder at the hand of a monster but also because Phèdre's lineage (her mother's love for a bull results in the birth of the Minotaur who, incidentally, is also mentioned in “The Venus” [“The Venus of Ille”), and the lexical insistence on the term monster throughout the play. Phèdre reminds us that, irregular as it may be, interaction between monsters and humans can take effect—with ominous results.

Within the framework of speech acts, the intertextual juxtaposition of Phèdre and “The Venus” cuts even farther, as it does not stop at thematic and narrative details but encompasses the overall structure of the play: Phèdre's plot consists primarily in various characters' deferring and timing of a series of speech acts (confessions, accusations, inuendos, promises), that is to say, in varying the speech situations crucial to the felicity of a speech act. Accrued by the acute ambiguity of the characters' intentions (did Thésée really want his son dead; did Phèdre really want to accuse Hippolyte; did Hippolyte and Aricie really not want to inform Thésée of Phèdre's treachery, etc.). the “play” introduced by these deferments results in spectacular infelicities.

Another quotation from Molière's Amphitryon, where an amorous Jupiter takes Amphitryon's shape in order to seduce the latter's wife (while Mercury borrows Sosie's), underscores the possibility of an unintentional infidelity in “The Venus.” More importantly perhaps, although tampering with the proper reference for “Jupiter” and “Mercury” leads to a breakdown in communication (Amphitryon can no longer understand Sosie), again, it is not “without effect”: Sosie gets beaten up and Amphitryon's wife bears Jupiter's son.

Other quotations are worth mentioning: in Virgil's Aeneid, one occurs at the precise moment when Dido's love for Aeneas outweighs her moral obligation to her deceased husband; she decides to remarry. In Lucian's Lover of Lies or the Doubter, in which to illustrate what a lie is, a person tells the story of an animated statue who took revenge on the man who had wronged her. These various intertexts overdetermine “The Venus,” assigning to it a textual “unconscious”: they motivate textual details that would remain odd if left to considerations of verisimilitude or characters' motivation and, by highlighting some of the details of the story that would not otherwise be as decisive, displace the focus from a simple whodunit to an examination of the complexity of the relationship between language and multiple reference. Like the mirroring effects within the story (the doubles), the intertextual reading points to the fraying of the thread that we intuitively follow from intentions to effects, replacing it with a web of textual allusions and linguistic considerations.

Can we tell, then, what are the intentions of the story? In the final analysis, we do not know what story (either fantastic infidelity or sordid crime and madness) the text intends to communicate, but we know that it simultaneously enforces and overrules the suspension of disbelief; points to the implications and consequences of either one; examines the conditions for belief and disbelief, felicity and infelicity, sense and nonsense. In short, the story invites a reading that examines and reevaluates the very conditions for telling stories and communicating meanings.

Although we do not know for sure what really happened, we can still recount, of course, some of the majors turns of the plot. Here is just such an account of this story that I have published elsewhere:

A young man playfully puts the wedding band destined for his bride on the finger of a statue of Venus recently discovered by his archaeologically inclined father. When he tries to retrieve his ring, it is stuck, as if the statue had bent its finger to hold onto it. On his wedding night he is found dead in bed, where, according to his terrified young wife, a huge body had joined them. The police disqualify her testimony because the horror of that night has left her “insane.” The ensuing criminal investigation uncovers a rivalry between the bridegroom and another man, thus pointing at a likely suspect with a motive, but the man's footprints do not match those left in the garden by the killer. Was the young man murdered by a resentful rival? Did the statue come to claim her groom? Although the first hypothesis is dismissed for lack of conclusive evidence, no one explicitly advances the second. Even the narrator, a blasé archaeologist from Paris, does not offer any comments, despite the irony and marked condescension he expresses toward the villagers. The death of the young man remains unsolved, notwithstanding the strong indications that the statue must be the culprit.¹⁴

The first part of my story flows normally enough, not exhibiting any of the difficulties on which I have been dwelling. Halfway through my summary, however, at the crucial “whodunit” moment, my narrative breaks into a series of questions. From then on, I do not so much tell the story as reflect on my own difficulties in telling (or reading) the story. My account of “The Venus” clearly lacks the synthetic quality associated with a story. Children, for example, by far the experts when it comes to demanding a story would reject it. “So what next? What happened? Did the statue kill him or not?” are only a few of the questions with which they would voice their impatience with my stalling. This difficulty arises undoubtedly from the genre itself. Uncertainty and hermeneutic hesitations are the most obvious characteristics of fantastic tales.¹⁵ In “The Venus,” however, the narrative's uncertainty goes beyond the requisites of the genre: it results also from a series of questions pertaining to the felicity of a central speech act.

EFFECT OR EFFECTS?

By and large, the central incident does not conform to what Austin calls appropriate circumstances. The utterance should be a cut-and-dried case of “misfire” resulting in the worst infelicity: “the procedure which we purport to invoke is disallowed or is botched: and our (marrying, etc.) is void or without effect” (How to, 16). Can we then presume that Alphonse's unfortunate gesture was “without effect”? Is the marriage really void? The story certainly allows for the possibility of a felicitous speech act. Between felicity and infelicity stands the fatal embrace of the abominable yet exquisite body of the statue. Austin does not hesitate: when the participants are not “appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked” (rule A.2), “there is no accepted conventional procedure; it is a mockery, like a marriage with a monkey” (How to, 24). Yet Alphonse's horrible death suggests at least the possibility that nothing be farther away from a mockery than a marriage with an inappropriate partner: his “clenched teeth and black face denoted the most frightful agony” (“Venus,” 268-69). Austin—even as he notes that “‘without effect’ does not here mean ‘without consequences, results, effects’”—shows no interest for the consequences, results, effects of a marriage with a monkey—or a statue. The reader knows, however, that if Alphonse's act had ominous results, consequences, and effects, it is precisely because the story does not rule out the possibility that his conventional speech act took effect. Effect and effects may not be as far apart as Austin would have us believe.

I find it difficult, for example, to agree with Stanley Fish's suggestion that one way of cleaning up the muddle of speech act theories and restoring their usefulness is to distinguish between a speech act itself and its consequences and effects. Indeed, his is a familiar line of argument: perlocutionary effects are contingent, unpredictable, difficult to regulate; in short, a theoretical nuisance. The solution, then, is obvious: they must be excluded from the theory.

Speech act theory can point to these matters—they are perlocutionary effects—but it cannot explicate them because they lie outside the area of its declared competence. … Obviously this does not mean that perlocutionary effects don't occur or that we shouldn't be interested in them when doing literary criticism, but that speech act theory can offer us no special help in dealing with them, apart from telling us that they are what it cannot handle. And if we insist on asking the theory to do what it cannot, we will end up by taking from it the ability to do what it can.¹⁶

Fish's line of demarcation between the theory and its outside rides on conventions. A conventional effect is illocutionary and therefore in. A nonconventional effect is perlocutionary and therefore out (Fish ignores the string of philosophical essays that convincingly question the distinction between conventional and unconventional¹⁷). He thus lumps together different kinds of effects, with different degrees of immediacy to their causes, some being long-range effects that cannot be pinned immediately to the speech act itself. If, because of John and Mary's marriage, Peter (Mary's rejected suitor), engages in a life of crime, is incarcerated, kills his cell mate in a fight, and ultimately commits suicide, I doubt that any philosopher in his right mind would want to count Peter's unfortunate life story as an effect of Mary's illocutionary “I do.” Although it may be a consequence of Mary's choice, Peter's sad life cannot be attributed directly to the speech act and therefore cannot be considered as a string of perlocutionary effects. (Besides, a social worker may evoke his unhappy childhood, a psychiatrist may tell us that Peter had a pronounced Oedipal complex and spent his life expiating his desire for Mary-Mommy, a neurologist may find some neurological imbalance that led to his aggressiveness, Peter's father may think that this is what happens when a son refuses to go into the family business, etc.) I therefore agree with Fish that not every effect is a speech act effect. His discussion of Ohmann's reading of King Lear or Major Barbara has my full support (Fish 226-31). But I can no longer agree when he generalizes his quarrel with Ohmann and brings it to bear on all perlocutionary speech acts and on all results, consequences, and effects. Just because a single speech act cannot be made responsible for an endless string of events (this is another problem altogether, as my love triangle shows: it raises the much discussed problem of causal chains and their possible proliferation and indeterminacies), this is not to say that the same speech act cannot have any effect that is not conventional (that is not dictated by a convention).

For instance, if I suavely remind you that your aging parents are living in the Third Reich (Austin's example, How to, 119), I am most certainly threatening you (illocution). My threat is a felicitous illocutionary act, even if you do not take heed. If, however, my threat intimidates you or deters you from doing something, then my illocutionary utterance also has a perlocutionary force (intimidate, deter); that is, it affects you. Note that the perlocutionary effect did not just happen to follow my utterance (if I had complimented you on your new tie, feeling intimidated would have been totally out of place) it is inseparable from the rest of my message. I could not logically say, for example, “I threatened you, but I did not intend to intimidate you,” or “I threatened you, but I hoped it would not deter you from doing something.” My utterance was certainly not a benign reminder of your parents' address. When I threatened you, I aimed for a specific perlocutionary effect, otherwise, I might as well have complimented you about your tie. A threat is meant to intimidate, deter, etcetera. It does not owe its force to some accidental later consequences, added to the original effect. Nor is it an accident that in response to my threat you felt intimidated: the perlocutionary force of my threatening utterance is contemporaneous with the perception of the threat. If you understand the illocutionary force of my reminder, my illocutionary speech act is felicitous (Austin speaks of ensuring the uptake of an illocutionary act). If, however, you and your parents are committed to the idea of resisting threats, I may not deter you from your course of action. Your political convictions and your force of character would nullify the perlocutionary force of my threat. Even if ruined and orphaned, you live to regret your decision, we shall still not speak of the “delayed felicity” of my perlocutionary utterance, for your change of mind results not from my utterance but rather from the unhappy consequences that your refusal to be intimidated has brought upon you.

We then have to admit the possibility of a curious situation, in which an utterance can be at the same time a felicitous illocution (you know that in reminding you of your parents' address I am threatening you) and an infelicitous perlocution (you won't allow my bullying to intimidate you). The former is a component of communication; the latter involves a new factor, uncontrollable by the speaker (and indeed, this is what makes it so difficult to theorize). But it remains a speech act nonetheless—at least, if we maintain that to perform a speech act is also and at the same time (not just later) to do something in or by saying something. As long as we are not rejecting the notion of speech acts in toto, we have to accept that a theory may neither master nor control totally either “the area of its declared competence” or the consequences of its felicity. I am not contesting that effects and consequences are problematic or that perlocution is a can of worms (“It is the distinction between illocutions and perlocutions which seems likeliest to give trouble,” writes Austin [How to, 110]).¹⁸ But excessive categorization—especially when followed by the exclusion of elements that may interfere with those categorizations—is not the solution. If a person's intellectual temperament is such that he or she feels compelled to solve problems, then let him or her first address the problem (as Austin did [110-20]), not push it aside.

Fish's definition is in fact an attempt to distinguish between Austin's effect and effects; unfortunately, perlocution, which Austin decidedly—and rightly—considered among speech acts, gets lost in the shuffle. It is therefore not enough to mention effects, as do Ohmann and Fish. As Austin points out, all effects are not alike. Some (as in Ohmann's ill chosen examples) are contingent and therefore not perlocutionary at all, but others are built into the original speech act and constitute its raison d'être. These are definitely perlocutionary effects, and the general problem of causality should not be confused—as is the case in Fish's analysis—with the questions raised by perlocution within the framework of speech acts.¹⁹ The line separating the two is not always clear; we may encounter uncomfortable gray areas, but this is hardly a reason to drop the question altogether.

Austin, for instance, acknowledges that all illocutionary acts are conventional. Like Fish, he also suggests that the consequences of a speech act may not stretch indefinitely and that we “have then to draw the line between an action we do (here an illocution) and its consequences” (How to, 111). At the same time, acutely aware that the thorny problem of consequences is intricately built into the very tenets of the theory, he wonders for a moment, “Ought we not, in seeking to detach ‘all’ consequences, to go right back beyond the illocution to the locution—and indeed to the act (A.a), the uttering of noises, which is a physical movement?” (113-14).²⁰ If answered affirmatively, this question could put an end to all speech act theories. Rigorously pushing to its logical extreme a line of reasoning similar to Fish's, Austin shows how it would end up negating force altogether. For instance, Austin imagines a scenario in which one would say about illocution: first a speaker states something (simple locution); second, and only as a consequence of having been first stated, this utterance projects an illocutionary force. Austin vehemently rejects this simplistically causal perception of speech acts, emphasizing instead that the illocutionary and perlocutionary forces are built into the utterance and constitute its most fundamental semantic charge. They are inseparable from the original semantics of the utterance: “And further, much more important, we must avoid the idea, suggested above though not stated, that the illocutionary act is a consequence of the locutionary act, and even the idea that what is imported by the nomenclature of illocutions is an additional reference to some of the consequences of the locutions, i.e., that to say ‘he urged me to’ is to say that he said certain words and in addition that his saying them had or perhaps was intended to have certain consequences” (114-15, Austin's emphasis). That the question of causality remains nonetheless troublesome does not escape his attention. In his various papers, when discussing the distinction between illocution and perlocution, he invariably admits that any formal criterion making it possible to tell them apart is, at best, slippery. And yet, although many categories and distinctions drawn in the first lectures of How to function mostly as heuristic devices, only to collapse later under his scrutinizing eye (the all-important one between constative and performative, among others), perlocution remains throughout, as does the plea to avoid the temptation of a naïvely temporal causality.

One may feel tempted to raise yet another argument. “Our word is our bond,” says Austin, but the young man did not utter a word. Can there be a speech act without speech? Austin hesitates but eventually recognizes that “infelicity is an ill to which all acts are heir which have the general character of ritual or ceremonial, all conventional acts. … This is clear if only from the mere fact that many conventional acts, such as betting or conveyance of property, can be performed in nonverbal ways. … This much is obvious” (How to, 19). Indeed, if I wave a finger, it can be for no specific purpose, but if I am at an auction and wave a finger, I may find myself the proud owner of an indescribable relic. The difference between the two lies in the conventional aspect of auctions, which recognize finger waving as the equivalent of an explicit (verbal) bid. Finger waving then means bidding. Even if the locution itself is missing, its force can still be expressed by an explicit performative verb. In a still different situation, finger waving can express my discontent and be taken as a warning or a threat. Since the speech act hinges upon the explicit performative understood in the gesture, we may say that from the viewpoint of speech act theory, there is no difference between a verbal and a nonverbal speech act. In other words, a “nonverbal convention” is a contradiction in terms. Even if no word is uttered, to be recognized as meaningful an act depends on the verbal utterance into which we transcribe it. In raising my hand at an auction, I signify my intention to bid. In waving my finger at you, I admonish you. In doing x, I am doing y is, of course, Austin's formula for illocutionary acts. The conventional aspect of a meaningful act is therefore no more than the performative verb that makes explicit its force(s) and, of course, the general code that allows for the substitution of the actual act (waving) for the explicit performative(s) (admonish, bid, etc.).²¹

CONVENTIONS

Austin's rule A states that:

A.1. There must exist an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, that procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances, and further,

A.2. the particular persons and circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked. (How to, 14-15)

The rule is so simple and obvious that it hardly seems to deserve comment. And yet Austin's next two lectures constitute just such a commentary. They do not, however, paraphrase, explain, or illustrate the rules as much as they present a myriad of cases that we may consider either as exceptions or as indeterminable borderline cases. Austin also explores and questions the exact meaning and extension of some of the key concepts he used in the formulation of the rules (“exist,” “accepted,” “procedure,” etc.). Most of the time, he leaves open the questions he raises. After citing infelicitous speech acts that do not follow rule A.1 properly, for example, he notes that “Much more common, however, will be cases where it is uncertain how far a procedure extends—which cases it covers or which varieties it could be made to cover. It is inherent in the nature of any procedure that the limits of its applicability, and therefore, of course, the ‘precise’ definition of the procedure, will remain vague. There will always occur difficult or marginal cases where nothing in the previous history of a conventional procedure will decide conclusively whether such a procedure is or is not correctly applied to such a case” (How to, 31). What is left of a procedure if we know neither “which cases it covers [n]or which varieties it could be made to cover”? if we cannot determine “the limits of its applicability”? if “‘the precise’ definition of the procedure will remain vague”? Austin's numerous illustrations of such uncertain cases clearly show that, although “difficult or marginal” for the theory, these irregularities are plentiful and cannot be dismissed as mere exceptions. And what of conventions themselves if, as he wistfully notes, “it is difficult to say where conventions begin and end” (119)?

The second set of conditions adds insult to injury:

B.1. The procedure must be executed by all participants both correctly

B.2. and completely. (How to, 15)

But then we are told that for B.1 “examples are more easily seen in the law; they are naturally not so definite in ordinary life, where allowances are made” (How to, 36); and for B.2 “here again in ordinary life, a certain laxness in procedure is permitted—otherwise no university business would ever get done” (37)! How can a procedure be at once executed correctly and completely and admit allowances and laxness? Must it be executed correctly and completely or not? How much laxness can it bear?

The students of speech act theories are quick (and wrong) to point out that the distinction between performative and constative eventually collapses, to be replaced with the triple distinction locution/illocution/perlocution—which in turn half-collapses by the end of the book (see pp. 226-29) This does not mean, however, that rules A and B should simply be discarded (or maintained). Austin warns us against such simplistic dogmatism: “It may appear in all this that we have merely been taking back our rules. But this is not the case. Clearly there are these six possibilities of infelicities even if it is sometimes uncertain which is involved in a particular case: and we might define them, at least for given cases, if we wished. And we must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation” (How to, 38, Austin's emphasis). The unnarratability of “The Venus of Ille” hinges upon this warning. We cannot simply contend that, since the procedure is both incorrect and incomplete and since the participant is inappropriate, Alphonse's gesture remains without effects or even without effect. Clearly, if we indulge in some ‘laxness” and make some “allowances” (rules B), if we stretch just a little the “limits of applicability” of the convention (rules A), then perhaps we have a felicitous speech act.

Such a possibility is mentioned in our story, and, not so surprisingly, it is envisioned by none other than Alphonse himself: “Besides, what would the people here think of my absent-mindedness? They would make fun of me. They would call me the husband of the statue” (“Venus” 259). The narrator, too, muses over conventions and their power to regulate felicitous speech acts: “‘What a detestable thing,’ I said to myself, ‘is a marriage of convenience! A mayor puts on a tricoloured sash, and a priest a stole, and behold, the noblest of girls may be dedicated [livrée] to the Minotaur!’” (266). Had the mayor forgotten to bring his sash or the priest his stole, would the noblest of girls have been any less dedicated to the Minotaur? Just because the statue is an unconventional bride, can we be absolutely sure that this convention has reached the limits of its applicability? Haven't we already been duly informed that there is no knowing where conventions begin and end? Couldn't we think that in certain attenuating circumstances this convention could be stretched just enough to include Alphonse's marriage to the Venus? The suspension of disbelief, for example, can constitute just such a circumstance: since it cancels out the distinction animate/inanimate and human/nonhuman, it protects Alphonse's action from its most obvious cause of infelicity.

Furthermore, once a speech act evokes conventions, procedures, effects, and consequences, can it cancel them out, can it neutralize them on the pretense that because of a procedural technicality, it is null and void, without effect? Is effect really as far removed from effects as Austin claims? Once summoned into this narrative, can the otherness of the statue simply be dismissed on a technicality (“he did not mean it,” “the mayor did not have his tricolor sash on,” “the priest forgot his stole,” etc.). The statue, for one, may think differently. After Alphonse, realizing that he has forgotten to retrieve his ring after the tennis game, goes back to the tennis court, he returns to the wedding party livid and informs the narrator that he was unable to remove the ring because “the Venus … has clenched her finger. … The finger of Venus has contracted and bent up; she closed her hand, do you hear? … She is my wife apparently, because I gave her my ring … She will not give it back.” The narrator's reaction takes place in two stages: “I shivered suddenly, and for a moment my blood ran cold. Then the deep sigh he gave sent a breath of wine into my face and all my emotion disappeared. ‘The wretched man is completely drunk,’ I thought” (“Venus,” 264-65). The “enlightened” narrator is only too happy to explain away one unacceptable situation (the resistance of the statue) by another that is relatively more acceptable (drunkenness). As is often the case, causality is elicited to rationalize and dismiss unpleasantness. And yet the two events may well not be related: even though Alphonse is drunk, the statue could have bent its finger, holding fast to the ring. Venus (known for her bad taste) may not share the narrator's repugnance for Alphonse's coarseness; she may even have her own idea of what constitutes acceptable “laxness in procedure.”

The effect of this episode does not rest so much on the questionable legitimacy of the “wedding ceremony” as on the narrative's insistence on the part played by the statue in the illocutionary transaction (her uptake) and on her subsequent entwining in Alphonse's wedding plans. Minotaur or statue, Beauty may just have been dedicated to the Beast (or at least, the Beast may think so). To the contortions Austin inflicts on language and its illocutionary rules, the statue opposes its stiffness, its coldness, its mute thingness. In the wedding bed the Venus appropriates and contains Alphonse within this thingness in a deadly embrace that leaves a circular mark on his body (a livid ring around his chest that mirrors the wedding ring she leaves on the floor of the bedroom). Alphonse is a victim of the absolute otherness that he casually challenged believing that since the participant was not “appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure,” his action would not have effect. At the limit of language, its lax conventions, and its ambiguities stands thingness. Reference may well try to bring this thingness into language, calling upon causality to explain its otherness—not only does the statue's materiality remain irreducible, but, given the murder weapon (her bronze body), the effect of Alphonse's silent speech act is an instance of the same irreducibility of things that language purports to deny. Felicitous or not, Alphonse's speech act has achieved an awesome effect: it has exposed the hubris and power of repression inherent in language and has brought into the open its other, the “thing-effect.” As he catches a glimpse of Unheimlichkeit, the narrator “shivers”: things are impenetrable, irreducibly alien. At the same time, however, they are perfectly tamed, designated by the words with which we replace them in our daily transactions, and subject to linguistic causality. Alphonse's wedding with the statue may be with or without effect, but another, much more ominous, effect has taken place: the thing.

And yet we must remember that the story is not construed as a fairy tale in which anything is possible as long it does not disrupt the story's internal semantic and narrative coherence. The narrator, at least, seems to uphold a realist view of the world, one in which statues are harmless, inanimate objects, and wedding ceremonies rely on conventions, sashes, and stoles; one in which disbelief (his own) is never suspended (except for the momentary shiver). The fantastic aspect of the story (as opposed to the marvelous—I am borrowing Todorov's distinction) results largely from the narrator's enlightened realism and his rejection of superstitions and supernatural phenomena. Since, after all, the story is told exclusively from this narrator's viewpoint, the reader has no angle on it other than this enlightened realism; the reader cannot therefore readily accept the supernatural reading that the facts seem to dictate, nor make allowances for statues in marriage procedures. We are then left with the possibility of an unconventional convention, the possibility of a felicitous speech act uniting a man and a statue, the possibility of bigamy, the possibility of effect and effects. Or again, we are left with the possibility of clear lines of demarcation, the possibility of excluding a statue from the convention as an inappropriate participant, the possibility of a perfectly normal marriage with Mlle de Puygarrig, the possibility of an unresolved murder (police archives are full of such cases), the possibility of a speech act without effect or perhaps even without effects. But either way something has happened. The thing has happened.

To sum up this discussion we may once more contrast Austin with Fish and Searle. Stanley Fish adopted convention as the ultimate test for speech acts. Searle introduced the distinction between brute and institutionalized facts. At first glance these definitions and distinctions appeal to our intuitive perception of conventions and seem perfectly valid. Austin, however, did not stop at that first glance and, true to his philosophical spirit, deliberately proceeded to question conventions themselves (see, for example: “Many of you will be getting impatient at this approach—and to some extent, quite justifiably. You will say, ‘Why not cut the cackle? Why go on about lists available in ordinary talk of names for things we do that have relations to saying, … why not get down to discussing the thing bang off in terms of linguistics and psychology in a straightforward fashion? Why be so devious?’ Well, of course, I agree that this will have to be done—only I say after, not before, seeing what we can screw out of ordinary language even if in what comes out there is a strong element of the undeniable. Otherwise, we shall overlook things and go too fast” [How to, 123, Austin's emphasis]). The result of his inquiry into conventions is an extensive questioning of his own theory (a questioning is neither a refutation nor a retraction).

Searle and Fish, on the other hand, present “theories.” They posit that convention (or in Searle's case, institution) is an intuitive term that needs neither examining nor questioning. Hence they proceed to elaborate a theory that rests entirely on the intuitive perception of the term by readers who, being part of these conventions, cannot criticize or even problematize them without considerable and deliberate scrutiny (which neither Fish nor Searle invites them to exercise). Conventions and institutions are human constructs, however, and as such, imperfect. Just like language—another convention—they lend themselves to abuses, errors, and agrammaticalities and have problematic margins and boundaries; and, just like language, they harbor innumerable difficulties for “theories.”

LANGUAGE VERSUS LANGUAGES

The last comparison with language is not accidental. But it does not merely reflect my own interest in language. Nor does it constitute the reduction of a story to its linguistic elements in the manner of formalism or early structuralism. The story itself thematizes, en abyme, language as such: narrative sequences raise explicit questions about the variety of languages, the hermeneutics of communication, and the unreliability of semantics. These sequences make up a long narrative segment, representing roughly one-tenth of the story (five out of fifty pages in my edition), about the translation and interpretation of Latin inscriptions. They bring into sharp focus the abundant scattered remarks and discussions in “The Venus” about the limits of applicability of conventions and institutions and the effect of these limits on hermeneutics and meaning.

There are two inscriptions on the statue. The first is on the pedestal: “CAVE AMANTEM.” Challenged by the old Peyrehorade to translate the Latin phrase, the narrator is somewhat embarrassed.

“But,” I answered, “it has two meanings. It can be translated: ‘Beware of him who loves thee; mistrust thy lovers.’ But in that sense I do not know whether CAVE AMANTEM would be good Latin. Looking at the lady's diabolic expression, I would rather believe that the artist intended to put the spectator on his guard against her terrible beauty; I would therefore translate it: ‘Beware if she loves thee’.”

(“Venus,” 243)

Even a phrase as concise as this one “has two meanings.” We should note that one of these meanings does not conform to the linguistic convention “completely and correctly” (rule B). It is a “lax” Latin, one that makes “allowances” for irregularities, one that stretches the rule a little—but that, nonetheless, constitutes a meaning. Neither character appeals to grammaticality (conformance to linguistic conventions) to buttress his reading, however. The narrator could simply have said that the first sense is not grammatical and that, from a purist's viewpoint, the second is therefore the only felicitous meaning. This would indeed have been an oversimplification, one of the many oversimplifications in which Austin saw at once the occupational disease of philosophers and their occupation. Implicitly admitting that some deviation from the convention has no effect on the felicity of a translation, the narrator opts instead for a referential contextualization of the inscription. He compares it to another “inscription” on the statue: her expression, which he interprets as diabolic. One interpretation then corroborates the other, and this in turn allows him to select one of the two meanings (we may even wish to simplify a little, as I did in a previous reading of this story, and contend that he looks at the object itself, the referent).²² The problem with contextualization is that contexts are legion (in fact, with a little perseverance, they are inexhaustible).

The old antiquarian brings in even more extensive contexts to shore up his preference for the first translation. Referring to Venus' notorious love affair with Vulcan, he interprets the inscription as “‘In spite of all thy beauty and thy scornful manner, thou shalt have for thy lover a blacksmith, a hideous cripple’” (“Venus,” 244). Indeed, “the words used are to some extent to be ‘explained’ by the context in which they are designed to be or have actually been spoken in a linguistic exchange” (How to, 100), but how far are we to contextualize? When is a context far-fetched enough to be smiled at, as the narrator does with the mythological allusion the old man proudly presents for his approval? Cave is a warning, a clear illocutionary utterance. And yet whom is it warning? To which of its possible contexts shall we resort in order to interpret the warning? For example, shouldn't we extend our notion of context to the two men engaged in translating? Shouldn't they consider themselves warned against attempting to reduce a sibylline inscription to the transparency of a message? In short, into what context(s), what situation(s), and what convention(s) shall we contextualize our utterance? What shall we do with the (s), with the discarded context(s), situation(s), and convention(s)—with the remainders (more on remainders in chapter 6)?

The second inscription, on the arm of the Venus, is even more problematic. It is no longer so much a question of deciding what is there as of filling in what is not there:

VENERI TVRBVL …
EVTYCHES MYRO
IMPERIO FECIT.

The unfinished turbul … poses a problem. The narrator hesitates between two approaches: first he looks for some “epithet applied to Venus which might assist [him].” When intertextuality fails him, he turns once more to a referential contextualization of her expression and suggests turbulenta, “Venus who troubles and disturbs” (“Venus,” 245). The old Peyrehorade contributes still a third approach consisting of two pages of fantastic etymologies in French, Greek, and Phoenician and concluding in turbulnerae because, says he, “a league from here, at the base of the mountain, is a village called Boulternère. It is a corruption of the Latin word TVRBVLNERA” (246). Ultimately, Turbulnera does not “mean” anything; it refers to what is there. It is, first of all, a pure indexical. Turbulnera thus extends the contextualizations to the interpreter's hic and nunc and, bursting the illusion of aesthetic and scholarly distances with which translators and interpreters usually surround themselves, asserts the centrality of the subject in reading and interpreting: the Venus is “local,” “from around the corner,” “our very own.”²³

The ellipsis after turbul … thus triggers three different hermeneutic effects: intertextuality, referential contextuality, and self-reference. As if to underscore this contextual slippage, Mérimée encodes his own name in the inscription: Eutyches is the Greek translation of Prosper. The artist has signed his work. But what work? the statue? the story? the gift (reading another ellipsis, a little hole in the arm of the statue, the narrator suggests that Eutyches Myro may be, not Myro the known sculptor, but an unlucky lover of the same last name, who hung a bracelet on Venus' arm as an expiatory offering, in the hope of appeasing the goddess and regaining his lady's love)? The highlighted self-referential contextualization thus exceeds the boundaries of the story proper and extends to the author himself or at least his name. (Note that this process works both ways: the estranged author's name becomes literally part of his work, no longer autonomous. Whether it is a name engraved in a statue or written in a literary text, it no longer “belongs” to the artist; it is consubstantial with the work itself.)

But contextualization does not limit itself to the contexts explicitly mentioned in the story. Anne Hiller, for one, replaces the old Peyrehorade's mythological context with a Freudian one: “Venus libitina. … The Venus seems to personify the ambiguous unity of the libido, at once a hedonistic movement and a death wish [désir de mort] projected on the loved object and wishing its annihilation” (Hiller, 212, trans. mine).²⁴ In this her approach is not unlike the antiquarian's: she brings her own context to bear on her interpretation of the inscription's ellipsis. To some extent any reading, any understanding, of a text widens contextualization to include the reader and the culture he or she represents. Contexts thus may spread indefinitely, not only, as Derrida notes, because any utterance can be quoted—taken out of its own context and transferred to a new one—but because even when it is left in its own context, its perception by an unlimited number of readers (each immersed in and part of a more or less idiosyncratic set of referential and cultural contexts) activates the possibility of a dizzying proliferation of contexts.²⁵

Context and conventions go hand in hand. We perceive an utterance within its immediate narrative context as well as within the context of a convention. (To some extent, an utterance also creates undeniably a context and a convention, as Fish reminds us, but this is mostly a chicken-and-egg discussion.) For example, just as the old antiquarian resorts to mythology (a conventional context), the reader, too, may appeal to mythology and folklore and thereby discover that an ominous marriage with a statue is a widespread topos (the folkloric and literary sources of “The Venus” have been hotly debated, mostly because the theme is so frequent that critics easily discovered—and defended—new ones.) A topos, too, constitutes a convention. That this convention may be at odds with the constructs through which we account for our daily experience, or even with our marital law, only points to the possibility of multiple and divergent conventions and procedures simultaneously evoked or perhaps created by a single speech act. Since we may not be able to add them up neatly and subsume them under one coherently comprehensive convention into which the speech act will be contextualized and by virtue of which it will acquire its illocutionary force, these multiple contextual conventions risk preventing us from ever determining the exact conventions, contexts, and circumstances essential to the examination of a speech act's felicity (and by extension, essential to an exact theory of language …).

Furthermore, language itself is but a convention, subject to all the procedural ills that can befall conventions. Understanding even a two-word utterance such as cave amantem may require diverse syntactical procedures, equally meaningful though incompatible with one another. “The Venus of Ille” reminds us that the notions of convention and institution extend far beyond our intuitive understanding. Not only is it difficult to delineate a convention, as Austin notes, but, since our world is teeming with conventions, it is also difficult to isolate one convention and even more difficult to isolate one conventional procedure that would not somehow be entangled in yet other conventions.

The pragmatic insistence on delineating and exhausting the inventory of relevant speech circumstances is not without analogy to structuralism. On either side of the Channel or the Ocean, “theoreticians” proceed in a similar manner: they single out sets of “relevant data” (and leave out “irrelevant” ones), which, by virtue of being grouped together, acquire their own syntax and semantics. Therefore I am not questioning so much specific aspects of a theory as the very action by which any theory gathers its relevant data and infers from them a set of rules that it then applies to new situational data—a gesture that necessarily presupposes its own feasibility. It is this very presupposition of feasibility that literary texts such as “The Venus” question: not because literature enjoys special privileges or plays the language game by different rules; not because it is not “serious” and therefore not bound to respect the rules (or vice versa); not because the “area of declared competence” (Fish's expression) of literature or literary criticism is different from philosophy's (as Fish himself illustrates, they can follow the same presuppositions); but because the literary text, not intending to construe such theories, does not limit itself to “relevant data.” Rather, it posits that any linguistic (semantic, syntactical, or semiotic) manifestation is relevant to language. It also acknowledges that the effects of language exceed communication. Thus it reminds us that the interferences of those aspects of language that “theoreticians” find irrelevant are perhaps the most relevant of all: unlike “relevant” data, they illuminate the whole area of competence of a theory, including its limitations, its failures, and, mostly, the line of demarcation between its competence and its incompetence.

The literary text is therefore not a case of nonserious language, as has been argued by philosophers and linguists alike: on the contrary, it is perhaps the only one that really takes language seriously—that takes language more seriously than it does the “theory” of language; the only one that exploits the felicity and infelicity of speech acts, thereby acknowledging that infelicity is not a “not doing” but an “other doing”—theories notwithstanding. It is precisely because of this inherent feature of the literary text that Austin, while setting aside literature, nonetheless had recourse to literary examples. I have already cited his use of Hippolytus' bad faith (p. 180). We should also add his scattered remarks, when, for instance, in the course of the discussion of possible misfires of rule A.1, he pointedly remarks that “the general position is exploited in the unhappy story of Don Quixote” (How to, 27). Don Quixote could be seen as a meditation on linguistic and cultural infelicities. Literature exploits infelicities. This is a far cry from a single-minded exclusion of literature from the philosophy of language. Indeed, we can easily construe How to Do Things with Words itself as a meditation on language's infelicities: with the exception of a few pages, the bulk of Austin's lectures consists of the creation of mininarratives illustrating infelicities. I, for one, see very little difference between Cervantes' and Austin's treatments of infelicities (there are differences between the two, but they lie elsewhere).

Furthermore, almost invariably, when discarding literature, Austin adds a restrictive clause, such as, for instance, “a performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy” (How to, 22, Austin's emphasis). Indeed no literary critic will claim that the actor on stage is committed to marrying the leading lady. Art voids some of the referential aspect of truth-value. Austin's exclusion of language is therefore no more than a reminder of the renowned suspension of disbelief. In a peculiar way, the language of poetry works differently, not because it presents something inherently different but because it presupposes a predetermined attitude shared by its readers toward some aspects of its truth-value. This attitude constitutes but one more convention: the literary (or artistic) convention. As such it has no problem fitting in a theory that poses conventions, contexts, and circumstances as its cornerstone.

It is also worth noting that Austin's restriction comes to bear not on literature, poetry, or theater but on their use of language, which he finds “parasitic upon its normal use” (How to, 22). We may argue with the notion of the use of language. It implies a mastery of language by the speaker, which, as Austin's note on psychoanalysis shows, is far from obvious (see pp. 181-82). We may need not “a new language,” as he thought, but a new theory of language, one that recognizes that the subject's use of language is far from exhausting what an utterance does (and as his meditation on infelicities goes on, Austin eventually comes very close to elaborating such a theory). We may also question the notion of normal use. Literary criticism has extensively examined the notions of linguistic norm and theories of écart. In Austin's texts, what is a norm? As we proceed through the twelve steps of How to Do Things with Words, we soon find out that Austin's relentless insistence on contexts and puzzles shows normal use to present as many “aberrations” as its literary parasite. If anything collapses during these twelve lectures, it is indeed the notion of norm. This, in turn, entails a collapse of the distinction between a normal use and one that would be parasitic upon it.

In the tenth lecture, Austin admits that the use of language in fiction “may be, and intuitively seem[s] to be, entirely different” (How to, 122). “May be” and “intuitively seems” (rather than a simple is) are very cautious reservations indeed, especially when followed by “further matters which we are not trenching upon.” They echo the ominous “if” on which he hinges his admission that the philosophy of language relies on the intimate knowledge of our consciousness and intentions and that the Freudian unconscious would wreak havoc with this branch of philosophy. I therefore suggest that we take Austin's reservations and hesitations literally: in fiction, language may be used differently, but then, again, it may not.

In a literary text, language may misbehave—at least from the viewpoint of a theory of language. But it is important to remember that far from reflecting an etiolation, as Austin's ill-chosen expression states, it is a manifestation of language's enormous vigor—including the vigor needed to exceed the boundaries and obstructions that “theories” attempt to impose on it. …

AUSTIN'S FINAL WORD ON PERFORMATIVE VERSUS CONSTATIVE

These questions uncannily echo the trick the narrative voice plays on the listener-reader in How to Do Things with Words. The much talked-about collapse of the distinction between performative and constative in the eleventh lecture in that book maintains a similar duality. Having failed to find a single expression devoid of illocutionary force, Austin does not, as it has been said, abandon the distinction. There is therefore no need to save Austin from Austin (as Katz did²⁶), no grounds to accuse him of philosophically embarrassing aporias, or, worse, to label him confused and confusing. Austin does indeed offer a way out of the corner into which his rigorous examination of linguistic facts and his refusal of easy and unproven generalizations and “theorizations” seem to have gotten him. That his solution was not judged to be one by some philosophers and by literary critics such as Fish does not constitute a commentary on Austin's work so much as on the work of these philosophers and critics: it reflects their standards and criteria for satisfactory theorizing and, in so doing, exposes their conceptual dogmatism.

The following is the conclusion of Austin's eleven-lecture argument:

What then finally is left of the distinction of the performative and constative utterance? Really we may say that what we had in mind here was this:

(a) With the constative utterance, we abstract from the illocutionary (let alone the perlocutionary) aspects of the speech, and we concentrate on the locutionary: moreover, we use an over-simplified notion of correspondence with the facts—over-simplified because essentially, it brings in the illocutionary aspect. This is the ideal of what would be right to say in all circumstances, for any purpose, to any audience, &c. Perhaps it is sometimes realized.

(b) With the performative utterance, we attend as much as possible to the illocutionary force of the utterance, and abstract from the dimension of correspondence with facts.

(How to, 145-46)

Austin invites us to perform two major mental acts: focusing (or concentrating) and abstracting. In the final analysis, the logical grounds of a speech act are not in the intentions of the speaker, as Searle and most speech act philosophers would have it and as Austin's original but temporary rules held, but mostly in the reception of the listener, in the mental acts the listener has to perform in order to perceive an utterance as either performative or constative. Mostly, because the same activities are required of the speaker as well. But the speaker alone cannot secure the felicity of an utterance: unless the listener performs the necessary abstracting and focusing, she or he will miss the expression's force, and the utterance will be condemned to infelicity. In the normal practice of language, utterances are not purely performative or constative.²⁷ They become performative or constative when the listener, guided by (perhaps lax) conventions, (infinite) contexts, and (intersubjective and ambiguous) speech situations, abstracts one aspect and focuses on another.

This solution sounds a familiar tone. It echoes Saussure's anguished insistence that “it is false to admit within linguistics any fact as defined in itself,” that “there is nothing, that is to say nothing that would be determined in advance outside of the point of view,” and eventually that “the point of view MAKES the object.”²⁸ Indeed, the general and hasty contention that the distinction collapses and that Austin almost ruined a good idea by hopelessly entangling it in a mesh of counterexamples also echoes Ogden and Richards' stubborn refusal to acknowledge the paragraph in which The Course addresses the precedence of the viewpoint over the object. When intellectual history repeats itself, it is usually because, despite the time gap, thinkers still answer to the same ideology. What collapses in How to Do Things with Words is not the distinction between performative and constative utterances but the very notion of permanent distinctions dear to theorizers. Whereas the former is a minor nuisance easily remedied by “theoreticians” such as Katz, Searle, or Fish, the latter mirrors a methodological concern invalidating the “theoretical” method of investigation and, with it, the sum of the theories this kind of method may produce. What Austin does in How to Do Things with Words is, in fact, a deconstruction of the “theoretical” mode of investigation. I therefore find it highly ironic that Derrida's critique of Austin in “Signature Event Context” is so un-Derridean: that is to say, that his critique addresses mostly the propositional content of Austin's text while ignoring the power of his rhetorical strategies.²⁹ And yet Austin's most subversive message lies not in the discovery of performative utterance (Frege, for example, mentions them in “The Thought,” see above, p. 125) but in the slow, patient, playful, and constant reversal of his propositions into their opposite, until the very notion of an “objective” or “constative” proposition collapses (which is also exactly what he says in the conclusion I quote above). That this last sentence equally describes Derrida's style and discursive strategies is, I hope, obvious to the reader familiar with both. Austin and Derrida may be a lot closer than the discussion of either “Signature Event Context” or “Limited, Inc.” suggests. The numerous literary essays decrying Austin's expulsion of literature and his excessive categorization (among which I include my 1981 article on “The Venus of Ille”) reflect a similar oversight.

“It was examples of this kind,” Austin comments further, “like ‘I apologize,’ and ‘The cat is on the mat,’ said for no conceivable reason, extremely marginal cases, that gave rise to the idea of two distinct utterances” (How to, 145-46). Away with fabricated examples for the sole purpose of illustrating unshakable distinctions and proving a theory. Away with utterances said for no conceivable reason. A theory may have recourse to such examples for heuristic purposes (life is too short to invent a full-fledged situational context for each minor example), but, before one draws conclusions and proceeds with generalizations based on these out-of-context expressions, one should remember that they are “extremely marginal cases,” and, in fact, a pure fiction at the service of the “theory” to which they appear (and only appear) to lead. Distinctions depend on contexts, abstractions, and focusing. Only with the proper contextualization—and I take this term to include the speaker and the listener, the situational context, and the reigning ideological contexts—can theories be addressed.

Notes

1. To my knowledge, there are only two studies that articulate in some detail the connection between studies of the first person and theories of speech acts: Elisabeth Bruce, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and Leah Hewitt, “Getting into the (Speech) Act: Autobiography as Theory of Performance,” SubStance 16, no. 1 (1987): 32-44.

2. See Gottlob Frege, “The Thought: A Logical Enquiry” in Logic and Philosophy for Linguists, ed. J. M. E. Moravcsik (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 282-84; and Gottlob Frege, “On Sense and Reference,” in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970), 67-68; see also the section on Frege in chap. 4.

3. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1981), 60-62; hereafter cited as How to. Searle makes a similar claim in his discussion of “the principle of identification.” See John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 78-94; hereafter cited as Speech Acts. Unless otherwise indicated, emphasis is mine.

4. The most notable works in the literary perspective are Bruce, Autobiographical Acts; Hewitt, “Getting into the (Speech) Act”; Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); and Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977).

5. John R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” in his Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), hereafter cited as E&M; Richard Gale, “The Fictive Use of Language,” Philosophy. The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy 46, no. 178 (October 1971): 324-39; Joseph Margolis, “Literature and Speech Acts,” Philosophy and Literature 3, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 39-52. One notable exception to this trend is an insightful essay written by a linguist, George L. Huttar, “Metaphorical Speech Acts,” Poetics 9, no. 4 (August 1980): 383-401.

6. Felman is the notable exception, as well as Mary Louise Pratt, “The Ideology of Speech Act Theory,” Centrum, n.s., 1, no. 1 (1981): 5-18, in which she reevaluates the general theory as well as her own earlier work.

7. This section borrows from my “Et la Chose fut: ‘La Vénus d'Ille’ de Mérimée,” Poétique, no. 41 (1981): 156-70.

8. “The Venus of Ille,” in The Writings of Prosper Mérimée Comprising His Novels, Tales, and Letters to an Unknown, with an Essay on the Genius and Achievement of the Author by George Saintsbury, trans. William M. Arnold, Olive Edwards Palmer, and Emily Mary Waller (New York: Frank S. Holby, 1905), 4: 257; hereafter cited as “Venus.”

9. For the second part of our discussion of intentions, see pp. 212-16.

10. Pratt, “Ideology of Speech Act Theory,” 5. This short essay goes much farther in its analysis of the relevance of the theories for literary studies than does her book. For a good reading and critique of the two, see Hewitt.

11. John Austin, “Other Minds,” in Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 109.

12. For a detailed analysis of the doubling effect between the statue and Mlle de Puygarrig, see Anne Hiller, “La Vénus d'Ille de Mérimée: Figuration d'un dualisme,” Australian Journal of French Studies 12, no. 2 (1975): 209-19.

13. Terme, simply rendered by “statue” in English, is the Roman God of boundaries. His statue was commonly erected to delineate property lines. Both Venus and Terme belong to the general context of Roman mythology in which they stand for opposite values: she is the goddess of transgression, and he is the god of property/propriety.

14. Ora Avni, “1837. Prosper Mérimée Publishes La Vénus d'Ille. Fantastic Tales,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 679.

15. In a recent enlightening study of “The Venus of Ille,” Ross Chambers has considerably sharpened the definition of the fantastic, in stressing the consequences of narrative indeterminacies. Forced to choose a story in order to progress as a narrative (even though this story may be contradicted later by others), the narrative singles out one of the confused narrative threads, to the exclusion of the others. This exclusion constitutes an act of violence toward the other possible stories crowding the narrative space. Violence, then, rather than indeterminacies, is the telltale sign of the fantastic, and, as Chambers convincingly shows in this reading of the story, it functions both thematically and narratologically. Ross Chambers, “Violence du récit, Boccace, Mérimée, Cortàzar,” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 14, no. 2 (1986): 159-86.

16. Stanley Fish, “How to Do Things with Austin and Searle,” in his Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 226-27.

17. See especially P. F. Strawson, “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts,” Philosophical Review, October 1964, 439-60. Of course, it all depends on what we mean by convention (see further pp. 302-12).

18. See also Austin's awareness of “the dubiety about what constitutes a subsequent action and what is merely the completion or consummation of the one, single, total action” (How to, 43).

19. Cf. Fish: “Here is another instance where the abuse of speech-act theory is also a comment on its limitations: just as it stops short of claiming knowledge of what happens after the performance of an illocutionary act, so is it silent on the question of what (if anything, the whole world may be conventional) preceded it. No one would deny that these are matters for a literary critic to inquire into, but they are the province of rhetoric (the art of persuasion, a perlocutionary art) and psychology. Speech-act theory can tell us nothing about them” (227).

    This quotation sums up my disagreement with Fish. Although I generally agree with his critique of various attempts to use speech acts in literary criticism, I take exception to his clean-up method. The question is not one of “after” or “before,” as Fish puts it. We are not discussing a haphazard contiguity. In the case of a speech act, what Fish calls “after” is in fact inseparable from the utterance itself: it is its force at the moment it is issued. What may (but does not have to) come “after” is its validation (or infelicity). We should also note that the reduction of speech acts to convention anchors Fish's views in the second (out of twelve) of Austin's lectures and makes no use of the subsequent insights found in How to Do Things with Words (including the critique of convention). Furthermore, a typical “theory,” it fails to question its own cornerstone (that is, the parameters and limitations of convention—a problem that Austin does address, see below, pp. 306-8). Instead, it eliminates from the purported scope of the theory anything liable to interfere with its neatness. Again, I much prefer Austin's “messy” approach.

20. Austin refers here to a rule established in his previous lecture: “We may agree, without insisting on formulations or refinements, that to say anything is (A.a) always to perform the act of uttering certain noises (a ‘phonetic’ act), and the utterance is a phone” (How to, 92).

21. Searle makes a similar distinction between brute and institutional facts. “I am brandishing a club” is a brute fact, while “I am threatening you” is an institutional one of sorts. Or again, to cite Searle's example, “a man has five dollars given the institution of money. Take away the institution and all he has is a rectangular bit of paper with green ink on it. A man hits a home run only given the institution of baseball; without the institution he only hits a sphere with a stick” (John Searle, “How to Derive ‘Ought’ from ‘Is,’” Philosophical Review 73 (1964): 54. See also Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as Text,” New Literary History 5, no. 1 (1973): 91-117.

22. Avni, “Et la chose fut.”

23. We may wish to engage in wordplays with boule ternaire (the tripartite circle) for Boulternère, which, like the squaring of the circle, polarizes between sense and reference. But the crucial indexical effect of “a league from here” gets lost in the pun.

24. Elaborating on the notion of context to include the reader was Roland Barthes' major point of disagreement with traditional criticism, in his Critique et Vérité (Paris: Seuil, 1966). The concept is also operative in most of the reader-response-oriented theories.

25. Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Glyph, no. 1 (1977): 172-97; reprinted in his Margins of Discourse, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

26. J. Katz, “How to Save Austin from Austin,” in his Propositional Structure and Illocutionary Force (Hassocks, England: Harvester Press, 1977).

27. I use the word normal here because in the next paragraph, Austin mentions the possibility that purely constative utterances may be found in mathematical formulae in physics books. Since I do not take a mathematical formula to be normal language, as Frege's Begriffschrift illustrates so well, we can safely assume that Austin answers negatively the question of whether a philosopher can theorize the logical status of an expression independently of its reception.

28. For the full quotation see p. 31.

29. Derrida, “Signature Event Context.”