"L'espace du roman" refers to the space where the writing of the novel, as well as the reading of it, takes place; but it is also a structure of representation--a descriptive device within the text. In Maupassant's six novels, which are still regarded by the public at large and by many scholars as a form of what Roland Barthes called a "sous-ecriture," spatial structures form a stratified narrative in which the reader may discover several levels of discourse, thus risking semantic ambiguity. A semiotic approach allows the critic to determine the principles of organization, the modes of production, and the narrative articulation of the text as a coherent system of signs. In this perspective, space is a structure of representation as well as a representation of this structure. To understand the dual function of space, one must explore the text in a two-dimensional axis of contiguity and association. Space is first defined as a "system," a paradigmatic account of thematic motifs such as the voyage, the function of particular objects, the figures of elevation and descent, and so on. It can subsequently be considered as a syntagmatic process in the case study of each novel. While following the chronological order of the works as well as that of each narrative, the reader must maintain a circular perspective, since factors of correspondence and correlation between the texts and within each text are very frequent. In the light of this analysis, the novel appears to be based on a spatial network encompassing three levels which overlap and undermine one another: the textual dimension, which is the referential space of representation, the intratextual dimension, which is the space where the text refers to its own performance (in particular with the motifs of the letter and the mirror), and finally, the intertexual dimension, the space of literary denotation, where the text refers to other writings. From Une Vie to Notre Coeur, there is a noticeable evolution in the intertextual level as the narrative progressively rids itself of literary references. The intertextual space in Notre Coeur has become "reflexive," since it refers to a completely fictitious novel, the exact replica of itself: reality in literature has become a form of invention. The mirror images, such as the one mentioned above, exist at all three levels of spatial organization, and reveal a metalinguistic instance in Maupassant's novels. In search of its own (re)construction, the text produces in fact a sort of "sur-ecriture" where space is always in "excess." Unmasking the illusions, yet covering up the transparent messages of the naturalist novel, the very function of space is to associate antithetical elements, to maintain unresolved distances. Like Bel-Ami's one-way mirror, space is both a passage and a reflection, and while entertaining the reader with narcissistic images, it gives him clues concerning not only the making but also the critical reading of the novel.

The constant movement of time is the most significant pattern in the complex texture of the novels of William Faulkner and Marcel Proust. Both authors focus on the continuity of past and present as a central theme, and use the temporal attitudes of their intellectual protagonists as a means of characterization, ultimately arriving at dissimilar conclusions concerning their characters' ability to survive. Whereas Marcel is portrayed in a successful effort to recall the actions of the past through the use of memory and the discovery of a metaphoric method, Faulkner's isolated intellectuals ultimately fail in their effort to understand the discontinuity between past and present. The quest which enthralls both Faulkner and Proust is the effort to discover elements of timelessness in the self and in experience. In the literary portraits of Marcel and of Faulkner's intellectual figures, they describe the protagonists' quests for unity of being and continuity of time within the framework of past, present, and future. With their philosophical focus on time as an eternal phenomenon which man attempts to survive through forms of transcendence, the Proustian and Faulknerian perspectives are remarkably parallel. While using several of the same aesthetic techniques, however, the two authors present their fictional interpretations of man's effort to transcend the passage of time in completely different manners. With his imagination focused on the present, and the belief that he experiences life's reality through the repetition of sensation, Marcel realizes that recurring sensation can restore his original sense of being, fusing past and present into one. Reality is thus revealed in arrested moments of memory that Marcel can then aesthetically reproduce in art, hoping that his writing will have the same effect of restoration of being for the reader. With imaginations held captive by the past, Faulkner's intellectuals believe that life's only reality is to be found in the recreation of their idealistic obsessions from a time long ago. Whereas Proust employs the aesthetic device of arrested moments and recurrent sensation as Marcel's artistic means of transcending time, Faulkner uses the arrested moments of his intellectual protagonists as an aesthetic device to reveal the static, spatially frozen quality of time created from an emotional impasse caused by the outraging of their ideals. Through use of the identical aesthetic device of the arrested moment, which Proust expands to be all encompassing and Faulkner contracts to be static and rigid, both writers nevertheless emerge with a philosophical emphasis on man's constant need for restoration of being, which represents life itself. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of school.) UMI

In Narrative Discourse Gerard Genette suggests the usefulness of examining narratives in terms of the relationships which exist among the story which the narrator sets out to relate, the narrative version of the story he actually tells and the act of telling the story. Taking as his model the various grammatical aspects of the verb, he examines these relationships with respect to time, mood and voice. The application of this approach in a study of four representative novels by Jean Giono--Un de Baumugnes, Le Chant du monde, Mort d'un personnage and L'Iris de Suze--brings to light aspects of his narrative technique which have not been clearly perceived before. The time aspect involves a comparison of the order, duration and frequency of events in the narrative with those in the story. Each of the Giono narratives displays a marked tendency to follow in its broad outlines the chronology of the story. At the level of smaller, mid-level narrative units a pattern of beginning many major divisions in medias res and returning to the past by means of alternating secondary narratives can be observed. At the microstructure level the primary narrator's utterances tend to remain closely tied to the narrative present moment. An examination of narrative speed reveals the texture of three of the narratives to be richest in the expositional sections, thinnest in the non-resolution portions and at a middle value as the conflicts are resolved. Each of the three is also found to follow a general pattern of scenes separated by ellipsis with narrative pause being rare and substitutes for summary the norm. The extensive use of iterative narrative in one work leads the narrator into conceptualization difficulties. The category of mood reveals a tendency to strive for less narrative distance by the direct reporting of characters' speech. Each of the four stories is internally focalized and a trend toward stricter adherence to a focalization concept can be detected. A study of narrative voice reveals a definite progression as the narrator in each successive work tends to be less evident as a personality than his predecessor.

The Ancien Regime's fall forced a re-evaluation in narrative outlook: the works of Stendhal register this post-revolutionary confusion. Chapter I considers paternal surrogation as furnishing the novel's narrative springboard. The erosion of the Patronym shoots Julien Sorel to the pinnacle of his career: pinnacle turns into brink. Happy Endings are eluded, to the general scandalization of critics, who have read a different novel encoded within Le Rouge. Chapter II focuses on Freud's patriarchal structures, suggesting that the Story of Fathers and Sons is inherently more narratable than that of mothers (example: the occulted Mme Sorel). Framing this plot of filial subversion are twin blades: the sawmill and the guillotine. The novel emerges as fantasy-construct of filial design: "Julien Sorel" is presented as a medium tendentiously refracting textual psychoconstructs. Chapter III probes the name's evocative power, addressing problems of intertextuality. Eradicating the patronym simultaneously lays bare the son's name, around which other bio-narratives cluster. Julian Hospitatur and Julian the Apostate constitute palimpsest texts beneath the surface narrative. The fate of John the Baptist (present in the novel) dictates Julien's, over whose decapitated head other tales converge. Le Rouge opens on a Primal Scene of Writing. Chapter IV examines the novel's indictment of the usurpatory capacities of the Word. First the Son's weapon, the Father appropriates the Word, containing its contagion in secret libraries. Paternal speech yields to its degraded progeny, writing, which subsequently virilizes Mathilde. Only the Mother stands untainted. Blades, the erstwhile signifiers of castration and metonymy, are here re-read as agents of parturition. The five church tableaux group characteristics clearly uterine; birth is in turn incorporated into the narrative dynamic. The birth scenarios inaugurating each cycle function metaphorically, lending coherence to a syntagmatic flow otherwise doomed to meaningless repetition. The blade stands at the juncture of metaphor and metonymy, myth/history, Maternal/Paternal. The ending traditionally misapprehended as the decapitation shifts to the projection of Julien's "son" left dangling in utero as the textwork is accomplished at the expense of closure: the babe-in-a-matrix constitutes a restitution of the originary lack out of which this celebrated narrative has been spawned.

The theme of cruelty emerges as a fundamental element in the numerous and varied interpersonal relationships of Marcel Proust's masterpiece, A la recherche du temps perdu. Cruelty in Proust's major artistic creation is actively present in situations involving two or more characters who inevitably assume either one of two roles, that of victim or of aggressor. Cruelty exists in the novel as a state in which the victims cannot and do not escape from their fate of mental subordination, while the aggressors consciously continue with success in the psychological massacre of their weaker, more sensitive opponents. Among the major victims are found the following characters: Saniette, the timid archivist; La Berma, the talented actress; Vinteuil, the gifted composer; Swann, the art-loving dilettante; and Charlus, the eccentric aristocrat. All are sensitive, creative individuals who are overburdened and ultimately consumed by the sordid reality of their existence. Monsieur and Madame Verdurin, the Duke and Duchess of Guermantes, Odette, Morel, and Francoise represent the primary aggressors in the novel. The analysis of the interpersonal relationships in A la recherche du temps perdu is aided by the closed nature of the Verdurin salon which the Verdurins effectively control with the collaboration of Odette and Morel. The Duke and Duchess of Guermantes reign as the aggressors of the artistocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain. Francoise skillfully manipulates the household staff of the narrator's family. The basic information of the narrator's hypersensitive nature is examined by analyzing the environment in which he is nurtured. His grandmother and mother provide a protective shell for the sickly child where love and the absence of selfish motives dominate. These two women represent the antithesis of cruelty in the novel, and the narrator's sheltered childhood contrasts sharply with the forces of ambition, greed, egocentricity, jealousy, and superficiality encountered elsewhere. Though studied for many other qualities, Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu merits a reassessment of the impact of the theme of cruelty on the novel. The characters and their roles have been carefully conceived and developed within the structure of the adversary relationship which separates the protagonists into the roles of victim and of aggressor.

Madame d'Aulnoy's Contes des fees and Nouveaux Contes des fees were published in 1697 and in 1698. They were immediately successful and wre reprinted numerous times during the eighteenth century, both inside and outside of France. These fairy tales appeared at the beginning of a period in which the fairy tale itself was very popular in France. The popularity of the fairy tale genre was due to three factors: an existing belief in the merveilleux, popular literary tradition, and a number of historical, economic, and social factors. The success of Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales may be traced to her use of a popular genre and themes; to a lively style; and to a structure that embodied the transformation taking place in the French outlook of the beginning of the eighteenth century. Although the genre of Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales is formally the conte, these fairy tales are more like the dominant prose fiction genre of the time. This genre combined the brevity and chronological presentation of the nouvelle with the romanesque and love-oriented features of the roman. Love is the most important theme in the Contes des fees, and it is treated there as it was in the nouvelle/roman of the time. Travel and utopias are themes found in these fairy tales which will be more fully developed by the eighteenth century. The presentation of animals recalls the long seventeenth-century debate over the rational capabilities of animals, a debate that continued well into the eighteenth century. Nature is seen as a courtier at Versailles would know it. Magic, enchantment, and metamorphosis is the most common theme and one that is natural to the fairy tale. Madame d'Aulnoy uses a variety of techniques in the contes: characterization through names, descriptions, and some psychology; humor and irony; a rapid and familiar style; and realistic details. The structure of the contes des fees was considered, first, for types of events and the sequences of these events and, second, for meaning. The method of Vladimir Propp showed that Madame d'Aulnoy's fairy tales are complex and that her heroes and heroines are frequently more passive than is usually the case in fairy tales. The approach of Carl Jung revealed that both the heroes and heroines were continually in a process of renewal and transformation. As a minor work, the fairy tale collection of Madame d'Aulnoy offers insights into the period when the seventeenth century became the eighteenth. Style and structure have the dynamic qualities of the eighteenth century. The epic hero of the seventeenth century seems to have become much more passive, but the appearance of hidden resources within him assures the continuance of the process of transformation and renewal which the Contes des fees present.

These independently-articulated readings of two nineteenth-century historical novels, Vigny's Cinq-Mars and Flaubert's Salammbo, reiterate the theft and restitution of the elusive signifier in Lacan's well-known metaphor of psychoanalysis (and reading): "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'." Such a reading subverts the consolidated subject--the claim to unequivocal meaning in History--of Vigny's Romantic text, and consolidates the disseminate subject--the impossibility of assigning a meaning to History--in Flaubert's Realist novel. In Cinq-Mars, an initial focus on the novel's powerful and central scene of a popular uprising--a movement of revolt and repression which in a sense repeats the act of writing, the ordering of resistant signifiers into a form--leads us to a subsequent analysis of the character of Richelieu who embodies the Lacanian truth of the signifier as Master of the signified. He is the Other Author of the other text, the surface of signifiers, the metonymic chain of writing against which Cinq-Mars, as subject or signified of Vigny's counter-text, will provide the metaphoric illusion of depth and the vocal plenitude of Truth. Richelieu represents the alterity and opposition of a language the author of Cinq-Mars must overcome in order to accede to readability and meaning. In contrast to Cinq-Mars, Salammbo breaks down into a multitude of jewel-like shards which cannot be recomposed to reflect the wholeness of a literary or social architect, or Meaning as embodied in the person of the Author or, more abstractedly, in the coherence of a recognizable ideology. Our reading consolidates the subverted meaning of Flaubert's History by focusing on the philosophically-privileged motif of the veil. In Salammbo, the veil is momentarily "lifted" (in its plurality of meanings) to reveal what the novel's most eminent critics have failed to take into account: the undeniable spiritual evolution of Salammbo and Matho, whose ultimate demise can no longer be read as an unequivocal sign of pessimism, but as a celebration of becoming conscious.

The vocabulary of l'Assommoir is one of movement; it is the vocabulary of dance. The way in which people and even animals and machines move is expressed in terms that evoke the ballet of nineteenth-century France. Thus l'Assommoir presents an example of transposition of art. The relationship of dance to literature has not been studied before, so the terms of the study have to be determined by using anthropological and sociological studies of dance and works on ballet theater. The text of l'Assommoir is divided into sections like the acts of a ballet. The plot, like a balletic pretext, is less important than the telling of the story, the description of movement, and the expression of life through gesture. The ballet of l'Assommoir has a precedent in French ballet with repect to plot, character, theme, atmosphere, and symbolism. The method by which Zola achieves this evocation of ballet consists of three parts: word choice; association of gesture with certain situations and character types; and the use of techniques associated with the stage. The dance has influenced literature in many ways, beginning when "literature" was an oral, not a written, phenomenon, as in Homeric times. The stage has also been a place where the two genres met. In addition, many writers, such as Diderot, have sought to infuse more life into language by incorporating dramatic techniques into their words and their works. In nineteenth-century Paris dance and the figure of the dancer were important in the arts as a whole. Also, the concept of performance and performance viewed were the subject of intellectual and artistic interest. L'Assommoir's episode in the Louvre illustrates this point: The wedding party is a commedia dell'arte troupe parading through galleries viewing paintings, while they themselves constitute a spectacle, which in turn is reflected in the paintings. The emphasis on movement and the dance heighten the symbolic value of Gervaise's limp. This symbol, which makes her lame in a world of dancers, unites the poetic constructs of the text, even calling on images from ancient myths. The artistry with which Zola uses this symbol and the way in which it both unifies the text and unites l'Assommoir with the rest of the Rougon-Macquart cycle is a tribute to the often overlooked artistry of the author.

The appearance of the servant-hero in prominent eighteenth-century works such as Lesage's Gil Blas, Marivaux's Le Paysan parvenu and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste reveals a continuing preoccupation with the problem of the subservience of the individual in society. Stereotypes of inferiority subtly persist in the diverse manifestations of the character of the servant, and his social ascension does not automatically grant him acceptance or power. In general, elitist social attitudes common to the literature of the Ancien Regime continue to inhibit egalitarian trends suggested by the servant's rise to literary prominence. In the novels under consideration, the servant's role as a serious literary personage undergoes an evolution towards greater sophistication and complexity. From the acceptance of servitude found in Gil Blas, the former servant negates it entirely in Le Paysan parvenu, whereas there are hints in Jacques le fataliste that servitude might also offer access to liberation. These novels best exemplify the three levels of meaning associated with the servant and the matter of servitude: a literary level, most closely linked to the conventional and comic role of the valet; a social level, the image of man's interaction in a social environment; and finally a philosophical level, an interrogation into the problem of human freedom. Each of these novels is also structured around the continual formation and dissolution of the master-servant relationship, both literally and figuratively. Interaction among men is consistently defined between the poles of domination and servitude, on all levels of the social hierarchy. Parallels with the Hegelian paradigm of Master and Slave exist, but these eighteenth-century models fail to achieve a dialectical resolution. Only Diderot effectively suggests the liberating force of the slave. Finally, the nature of the narrative voice in each novel is also linked to the servitude of the hero. The servant participates more and more actively in the telling of the story, just as the narrator shows an increasing degree of control. However, the servant's struggle for power, like the narrator's quest, remains ultimately unresolved. The narrator must face his own subservience to his audience and to literary structures which, like the social structures they embrace, remain resistant to change.

Although published in 1959, the "Herodiade" manuscript has received very little attention. The purpose of this dissertation is to end this critical silence by a reading of the integral work which consists of some 200 pages of notes, variants and published texts. After a preliminary critique of Mauron's psychocritical reading of Mallarme (in particular his practices of translation, biographical speculation and textual reification), I examine Mallarme's view of the creative process as it appears in his early correspondence. The poet's discussion of productivity, negativity, depersonalization and the writing experience provides a springboard for drawing a number of striking analogies with Freud's theory of the Unconscious and dream interpretation. The focus of the ensuing chapters is on the problematic of creative process as mirrored in the production of the work itself. Chapter III is a reconsideration of Herodiade's narcissistic ego as a fictional construct which duplicates the relationship of the writer to the work. In Chapter IV, a comparison of Mallarme's and Freud's notion of the "uncanny" sets up my analysis of processes of repetition and repression in the textual variants for the "Prelude." A confrontation of the various versions of the "Prelude" demonstrates the persistent influence of covert psychic processes which have camouflaged phantasms of procreation, incest and death in the final draft. Chapter V analyzes how the castration motif in the "Cantique de Saint Jean" works as a metaphor for both the force and failure of textual production. It is by following the perpetual transformation of disruptive and ambivalent elements between variant and text that one finds a psychic economy which opens up "Les Noces d'Herodiade, Mystere" to alternative readings.