Scott Sprenger
126
that renders his language, images and metaphors fragmentary. The
narrator is, indeed, able to offer only a partial and incomplete idea of
his object despite the excessively long – even obsessive – description
of him. The old man is represented as a fragmented vestige from another era, but the key element that would give finality to the portrait
remains missing. Barthes’s insistence on the text’s plurality and infinite signification from the object’s undecidability thus seems plausible.
An “archaeological” reading of “Sarrasine”, however, demonstrates that the rupture at the heart of the text is self-consciously strategic and has a specific narrative function. The fragmentation plays an
important role in the archaeological reconstruction of the consciousness of the narrator’s psychical trauma and internal separation. The
puzzle pieces that the narrator presents in the first half of the narrative
(the description of the Lanty family, the fragmented condition of the
old man, the picture of the Adonis, etc.) are residual effects of an affective catastrophe that the narrator underwent in his past. Barthes’s
insistence on the “infini du langage” would have us believe that there
is no end to signification, forestalling any attempt to discover a
method for reassembling the fragments of the narrator’s lost illusion.
To identify the narrator’s catastrophic experience (which he
never actually mentions) and the correspondence between Sarrasine’s
catastrophe and the narrator’s divided consciousness, we must reappraise the narrative, thematic and allegorical dimensions of the text.
At the narrative level, Sarrasine’s catastrophe registers as a formal
separation between the two parts of the whole: the first is situated at
the Lanty’s, where the narrator and Madame de Rochefide observe
mysteries in need of resolution; the second is situated at Madame de
Rochefide’s, with the story about Sarrasine’s childhood offering a
means of solving the mysteries posed in the first. The narrative “catastrophe” corresponds exactly to the historical rupture between Old Regime Catholicism and the post-revolutionary period, effectively
between two countries, France and Italy, and between two cities, Paris
– the capital of modernity – and Rome, “la patrie des arts”, but also
the heart of Catholicism. The abrupt crossing of temporal and geographical frontiers corresponds to the internal rupture of consciousness marking the separation between Sarrasine and the narrator.
Attached to Catholic France (figured geographically by the still
Catholic nineteenth-century Italy where Sarrasine discovers transcen-
126
that renders his language, images and metaphors fragmentary. The
narrator is, indeed, able to offer only a partial and incomplete idea of
his object despite the excessively long – even obsessive – description
of him. The old man is represented as a fragmented vestige from another era, but the key element that would give finality to the portrait
remains missing. Barthes’s insistence on the text’s plurality and infinite signification from the object’s undecidability thus seems plausible.
An “archaeological” reading of “Sarrasine”, however, demonstrates that the rupture at the heart of the text is self-consciously strategic and has a specific narrative function. The fragmentation plays an
important role in the archaeological reconstruction of the consciousness of the narrator’s psychical trauma and internal separation. The
puzzle pieces that the narrator presents in the first half of the narrative
(the description of the Lanty family, the fragmented condition of the
old man, the picture of the Adonis, etc.) are residual effects of an affective catastrophe that the narrator underwent in his past. Barthes’s
insistence on the “infini du langage” would have us believe that there
is no end to signification, forestalling any attempt to discover a
method for reassembling the fragments of the narrator’s lost illusion.
To identify the narrator’s catastrophic experience (which he
never actually mentions) and the correspondence between Sarrasine’s
catastrophe and the narrator’s divided consciousness, we must reappraise the narrative, thematic and allegorical dimensions of the text.
At the narrative level, Sarrasine’s catastrophe registers as a formal
separation between the two parts of the whole: the first is situated at
the Lanty’s, where the narrator and Madame de Rochefide observe
mysteries in need of resolution; the second is situated at Madame de
Rochefide’s, with the story about Sarrasine’s childhood offering a
means of solving the mysteries posed in the first. The narrative “catastrophe” corresponds exactly to the historical rupture between Old Regime Catholicism and the post-revolutionary period, effectively
between two countries, France and Italy, and between two cities, Paris
– the capital of modernity – and Rome, “la patrie des arts”, but also
the heart of Catholicism. The abrupt crossing of temporal and geographical frontiers corresponds to the internal rupture of consciousness marking the separation between Sarrasine and the narrator.
Attached to Catholic France (figured geographically by the still
Catholic nineteenth-century Italy where Sarrasine discovers transcen-