Seductions in Narrative: Subjectivity and Desire in the Works of ...

Thoroughly unconcerned about the ensuing lack of understanding and the consequences of upset communication which his little language games may establish, Humpty Dumpty raises what today would be described as a poststructuralist issue: language constructs reality, and the relationship which words share with their meanings is far from natural.

In his Course in General Linguistics (1916) Ferdinand de Saussure describes language as a chain of signs, a description which has prevailed to this day. Each sign, Saussure claims, is made of a ‘signifier,’ a sound or written image, which is, in turn, related to a ‘signified,’ the meaning ascribed to it (Saussure 111). The relation between the two, following the Saussurean proposition, is arbitrary: no natural link is established between the sound and the concept it identifies. It is, therefore, a relationship that speaking subjects have come to agree on, depending on the language they use, and the culture they share. The apparent solidity of reality, largely based on meaning, easily crumbles at the possibility that a word may, one day, come to mean something completely different from what it has meant historically. If, after this one word which suddenly changed its meaning, came another, and then another, it is presumed that absolute chaos would reign. The idea of words suddenly changing their meanings is not so unlikely, as evidenced by multiplicity of meaning, for instance, a little trick of language which has come to be accepted as ‘natural’ but which may bring about more than one misunderstanding.

Poststructuralism acquires the Saussurean axiom by which meaning is not reflected by language, but produced within it, in so far as signs acquire their meaning in a relational way; that is to say, through their difference from other signs within the linguistic chain.¹ Saussurean theory, however, is readily based on an understanding of meaning as something unmoveable: