Untitled - Lear

Valentina Bianchi
values of the person feature. Note that in uttering of the words “time she stopped” or
“rock her off”, the “centre of consciousness” is apparently using a third person
pronoun rather than a first person one to refer to herself, as if the use of first person
were linguistically impossible (compare the Mouth’s “vehement refusal to relinquish
third person” in Not I). This corroborates the impression that the language of the
disembodied Voice is virtually person-less.
We may interpret this collapse of the person category by referring to Emile
Benveniste’s view of the corrélation de personnalité. According to Benveniste
(1966, 260), the dialogic dimension is constitutive of the linguistic category of
person:
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C’est cette condition de dialogue qui est constitutive de la personne, car elle
implique en réciprocité que je deviens tu dans l’allocution de celui qui à son
tour se désigne par je. […] La polarité des personnes, telle est dans le langage
la condition fondamentale…
An obsessive refrain in the Woman’s stream of consciousness is the complete
absence of another creature like herself, of any potential interlocutor (when she said
to herself / whom else…), until in the end the mother-rocker is turned into an
interlocutor (the addressee of the final imperative verbs). In the gradual fade out of
the Woman’s consciousness, the complete absence of an interlocutor makes the
deictic category of person virtually vacuous.
References
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