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Castration, Speech Acts, and the Realist Difference: S/Z versus Sarrasine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Sandy Petrey
Sandy Petrey*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Stony Brook
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Abstract

Roland Barthes's S/Z brilliantly details the way Balzac's Sarrasine undermines traditional understandings of realism's reference to the world. Considered through J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, however, Sarrasine appears not only to detach names from their referents but also to assert the irreproachable validity of every naming process sanctioned by the linguistic community in which it occurs. According to Austin, successful representation depends not on faithfulness to objective reality but on conformity to social conventions. Balzac's narrative illustrates Austin's point by depicting an unsexed castrato successively given opposite sexes in different communities. As exemplified in Sarrasine, the realist project insistently negates language's referential ground while just as insistently affirming its supreme representational authority.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 102 , Issue 2 , March 1987 , pp. 153 - 165
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1987

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