🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

(All parts in English)

So last time I led you to this signifier that the subject must in some way be in order for it to be true that the subject is a signifier. What is at stake, very precisely, is the One insofar as it is the unary trait:

We may refine this on the fact that the schoolteacher writes the one like this: 1, with an ascending stroke that indicates, in some way, where it emerges from. This will not, moreover, be a mere refinement, because after all that is precisely what we too are going to do: try to see where it comes out from. But we are not there yet!

So, in order to accommodate your mental vision, strongly muddled by the effects of a certain mode of culture, very precisely the one that leaves gaping the interval between primary teaching and the other called secondary, know that I am not in the process of directing you toward ‘the One of PARMENIDES’, nor ‘the One of PLOTINUS’, nor the One of any ‘totality’ in our field of work, of which people have for some time been making such a great case. It is indeed the ‘1’ that a moment ago I called ‘the schoolteacher’s’, the 1 of ‘student X, you will write me one hundred lines of 1s’, that is to say, sticks, ‘student Y, you got a 1 in French’. The schoolteacher, on his notebook, traces the einziger Zug, the unary trait of the sign forever sufficient for minimal notation.

This is what is at stake, it is the relation of this to what we are dealing with in identification. If I establish a relation, perhaps it must begin to appear to your mind like a dawn, that identification is not immediately collapsed into this, it is not simply this 1, at least not as we are considering it. As we are considering it, it can only be — you already see the path along which I am leading you — the instrument, at a pinch, of this identification, and you will see, if we look closely, that it is not so simple.

For if what thinks — the ‘thinking being’ of our last meeting — remains at the level of the real in its opacity, it does not go by itself that it should come out of this ‘some-being’ where it is not identified, I mean: not out of a ‘some-being-itself’ where it is, in short, thrown onto the pavement of some ‘extension’ that first had to be swept and emptied out by a thought. Not even that! We are not there yet.

At the level of the real, what we can glimpse is to glimpse it among ‘so-much-being’ — also in one single word ‘so-much-being’ — of a ‘being-so-much’ where it is hooked to some breast, in short at most capable of sketching out that sort of ‘palpitation of being’ that makes the Enchanter laugh so much in the depths of the tomb where the caution of the Lady of the Lake has shut him in.

Remember a few years ago — the year of the seminar on President SCHREBER — the image I evoked in the last seminar of that year, that — poetic — image of the Monster Chapalu after he had gorged himself on the bodies of the sphinxes bruised by their suicidal leap, that utterance, at which the Enchanter rotting will laugh for a long time, of the Monster Chapalu saying: ‘He who eats is no longer alone.’

Of course, for him to come into the light of being, there is the perspective of the Enchanter. It is indeed that, at bottom, which governs everything. Of course, the true ambiguity of this coming into the light of truth is what makes the horizon of all our practice, but it is not possible for us to begin from that perspective, of which the myth sufficiently indicates to you that it is beyond the mortal limit: the Enchanter rotting in his tomb.

Thus this is not a point of view ever completely abstracted from our thought, at an epoch when the ragged fingers of Daphne’s tree, when they stand out against the field scorched by the giant mushroom of our omnipotence, always present at the present hour on the horizon of our imagination, are there to remind us of the beyond from which the point of view of truth can be weighed.
But it is not contingency that makes it so that I have here to speak before you of the conditions of the true; it is a much more minuscule incident: the one that put me under obligation to take care of you as a handful of psychoanalysts, of whom I remind you that, of truth, you certainly do not have any to sell on, but that all the same that is your stuff, that is what you sell.
It is clear that, in coming toward you, it is after the true that one runs. I said the time before last that it is the true of the true that one seeks.

It is precisely for that reason that it is legitimate that, concerning identification, I started from a text whose rather unique character in the history of philosophy I tried to make you feel, in that the question of the ‘true’ is posed there in an especially radical way, insofar as it calls into question, not what one finds true in the real, but the status of the subject insofar as it is charged with bringing it there, this true, into the real.

I found myself, at the end of my last discourse, that of last time, arriving at what I indicated to you as recognizable in the figure already located by us of the unary trait, of the einziger Zug insofar as it is upon it that there is concentrated for us the function of indicating the place where, in the signifier, there is suspended — where there is hooked, concerning the signifier — the question of its guarantee, of its function, of what this signifier is for, in the advent of truth.

That is why I do not know how far today I will push my discourse, but it is going to be entirely revolving around the aim of securing in your minds this function of the unary trait, this function of the ‘1’. Of course, this is at the same time to call into question, this is at the same time to advance — and I think that, by this fact, I will meet in you a sort of approval, from the heart in the belly — our knowledge of what this signifier is.

I am going to begin, because I feel like it, by taking you a little truants’ schooling. The other day I alluded to a remark — kind, though entirely ironic — concerning the choice of my subject this year as if it were not absolutely necessary. It is an occasion to clarify this — this which is surely somewhat connected with the reproach it implied — that identification would be the master key, if it avoided referring to an imaginary relation that alone supports its experience, namely: the relation to the body.

All this is coherent with the same reproach that may be addressed to me in the paths I pursue, of always keeping you too much at the level of linguistic articulation, precisely as I strive to distinguish it from every other. From there to the idea that I fail to recognize what is called the preverbal, that I fail to recognize the animal, that I believe that man in all this has some privilege or other, there is but one step, all the more quickly crossed as one has no sense of making it.

It is — on reconsidering it — at the moment when more than ever this year I am going to make everything I explain to you turn around the structure of language, that I turned back toward a close, immediate, short, sensible, and sympathetic experience, which is mine, and which may perhaps illuminate this: that I too have my notion of the ‘preverbal’ which is articulated within the subject’s relation to the verb in a way that perhaps has not appeared to all of you.

Near me — among the entourage of Mitsein where I stand as Dasein — I have a bitch dog whom I named Justine in homage to SADE, without — believe me — my exercising on her any directed abuse. My dog — in my view and without ambiguity — speaks. My dog has speech, without any doubt. This is important, because that does not mean that she has language altogether.

The extent to which she has speech without having the human relation to language is a question from which it is worth envisaging the problem of the ‘preverbal’. What does my dog do when she speaks, in my view? I say she speaks — why? She does not speak all the time: she speaks — unlike many humans — only at moments when she needs to speak.
She needs to speak at moments of emotional intensity and of relations to the other, to myself, and to a few other persons.
The thing manifests itself by sorts of little pharyngeal whinings. It is not limited to that.

The thing is particularly striking and pathetic in manifesting itself in a quasi-human that gives me today the idea of speaking to you about it: she is a boxer dog, and you see on this quasi-human face, rather Neanderthalian in the end, a certain trembling of the lip, especially the upper one — beneath that muzzle, for a human somewhat raised, but anyway, there are types like that: I had a concierge who looked enormously like her — and this labial trembling, when it happened to her to communicate — to the concierge — with me at such intentional peaks, was not noticeably different. The effect of breath on the animal’s cheeks no less vividly evokes a whole set of mechanisms of a properly phonatory type which, for example, would lend themselves perfectly to the famous experiments of Abbé ROUSSELOT, founder of phonetics.

You know that they are fundamental and consist essentially in having the various cavities in which phonatory vibrations are produced inhabited by little drums, bulbs, vibratile instruments that make it possible to control at what levels and at what times the diverse elements that constitute the emission of a syllable come to be superimposed, and more precisely everything that we call the phoneme, for these phonetic works are the natural antecedents of what was later defined as phonematics.

My dog has speech, it is incontestable, indisputable, not only from the fact that the modulations resulting from her properly articulated efforts are decomposable, inscribable in loco, but also from the correlations of the time when this phenomenon occurs, namely the cohabitation in a room where experience has told the animal that the human group gathered around the table must remain for a long time, and that some leftovers of what is happening at that moment, namely the feast, must come back to her. One must not believe that everything is centered on need: there is certainly a relation with this element of consumption, but the communional element of the fact that she consumes with the others is also present there.

What distinguishes this usage, in sum very sufficiently successful for the results to be obtained in my dog, of speech, from human speech? I am not in the process of giving you words that claim to cover all the results of the question; I give only answers oriented toward what must be, for us, what is to be located, namely: the relation to identification. What distinguishes this speaking animal from what happens by virtue of the fact that man speaks is this, which is quite striking concerning my dog, a dog who could be yours, a dog who has nothing extraordinary about her, namely that, contrary to what happens in man insofar as he speaks, she never takes me for another.

This is very clear: this good-sized boxer bitch who, if one is to believe those who observe her, has feelings of love for me, gives herself over to excesses of passion toward me in which she takes on an altogether formidable aspect for more timid souls, such as exist, for example, at a certain level of my descendants: it seems that there one fears that in moments when she begins to jump on me with her ears laid back and to growl in a certain way, the fact that she takes my wrists between her teeth might pass for a threat. Yet it is nothing of the kind.

Very quickly — and that is why people say that she loves me — a few words from me set everything back in order, or even, after a few reiterations, by the stopping of the game. It is that she knows very well that it is I who am there, she never takes me for another, contrary to what all your experience is there to testify regarding what happens, insofar as in analytic experience you put yourselves in the conditions of having a ‘pure speaking’ subject, if I may express myself thus, as one says ‘a pure pork pâté’. The ‘pure speaking’ subject as such — this is the very birth of our experience — is brought, by the fact of remaining ‘pure speaking’, to always take you for another.

If there is any element of progress in the paths where I try to lead you, it is to show you that, in taking you for another, the subject puts you at the level of the Other, with a capital O. That is precisely what my dog lacks: for her there is only the little other. As for the big Other, it does not seem that her relation to language gives her access to it.

Why, since she speaks, would she not arrive as we do at constituting these articulations in such a way that the place, for her as for us, develops from this Other where the signifying chain is situated? Let us rid ourselves of the problem by saying that it is her sense of smell that prevents it. And we would thereby only be recovering a classical indication, namely that the organic regression of smell in man counts for much in his access to this Other dimension.

I do regret seeming, with this reference, to re-establish the cut between the canine species and the human species.
This is to signify to you that you would be quite wrong to believe that the privilege I give to language participates in some pride hiding that sort of prejudice that would make man, precisely, some summit of being.

I shall temper this cut by telling you that if my dog lacks this sort of possibility — not brought out as autonomous before the existence of analysis — which is called the capacity for transference, that does not at all mean that it reduces, with her partner, I mean with myself, the pathetic field of what in the ordinary sense of the term I precisely call human relations.

It is manifest, in my dog’s conduct, concerning precisely the reflux onto her own being of effects of comfort, of positions of prestige, that a large part, let us say it — not to say the totality — of the register of what makes the pleasure of my own relation, for example with a society woman, is there quite complete.

I mean that when she occupies a privileged place such as that of having climbed onto what I call my couche, in other words the matrimonial bed, the sort of eye with which she fixes me on that occasion, suspended between the glory of occupying a place whose privileged significance she perfectly marks out and the fear of the imminent gesture that will make her clear off from it, is not a dimension different from what points in the eye of what I have called, through pure demagogy, the society woman: for if she has no special privilege as concerns what is called the pleasure of conversation, it is indeed the same eye she has when, after venturing into a dithyramb on some film that seems to her the height of technical advent, she senses hanging over her from me the declaration that ‘I was bored stiff by it right up to the hilt’, which from the point of view of nihil mirari, which is the law of good society, already makes arise in her that suspicion that she would have done better to let me speak first.

This, in order to temper, or more exactly to restore the sense of the question I am posing concerning the relations of speech to language, is meant to introduce what I am going to try to draw out for you concerning what specifies a language as such, la langue as one says, insofar as, if it is man’s privilege, it is not immediately quite clear why it remains confined there. This is worth spelling out, if ever there was a case for saying so. I spoke of the tongue [French langue means both language and tongue].

For example, it is not indifferent to note, at least for those who have not heard of ROUSSELOT here for the first time, that it is all the same quite necessary for you to know at least how ROUSSELOT’s reflexes are made; I permit myself to see straightaway the importance of this, which was absent from my explanation just now concerning my dog, namely that I spoke of something pharyngeal, glottal, and then of something trembling all over, here and there, and thus recordable in terms of pressure, of tension, but I did not speak of effects of tongue. There is nothing that makes a click, for example, and still less something that makes an occlusion: there is wavering, trembling, breath, there are all sorts of things that approach it, but there is no occlusion. I do not want today to dwell on it too much, this is going to push back things concerning the ‘1’. So much the worse, one must take the time to explain things.

If I underline it in passing, be sure that it is not for pleasure, it is because we will find again — and we will only be able to do so well afterward — its meaning. It is perhaps not an essential pillar of our explanation, but in any case this time of occlusion will take on its full meaning at a certain moment, and ROUSSELOT’s tracings, which perhaps you will have consulted in the meantime on your own — which will allow me to shorten my explanation — may perhaps be particularly eloquent there.

To give you right now a good image of what this occlusion is, I am going to give you an example. The phonetician touches in a single step — and not without reason, as you will see — the phoneme ‘pa’ and the phoneme ‘ap’, which allows him to lay down the principles of the opposition of implosion ‘ap’ to explosion ‘pa’, and to show us that the consonance of ‘p’ is — as in the case of your daughter — to be mute. The meaning of ‘p’ is between this implosion and this explosion. ‘P’ is heard precisely by not being heard, and that mute time in the middle, keep the formula, is something which, at the sole phonetic level of speech, is, so to speak, a sort of announcement of a certain point where, you will see, I shall lead you after a few detours. I am simply taking advantage of the passage by way of my dog to signal it to you in passing, and to make you notice at the same time that this absence of occlusives in my dog’s speech is precisely what she has in common with a speaking activity you know well and which is called singing.

If it happens so often that you do not understand what the singer is jabbering [jaspiner is colloquial for chattering/jabbering], it is precisely because one cannot sing occlusives, and I also hope that you will be pleased to land back on your feet and think that everything falls into place, since in sum my dog sings, which brings her back into the concert of animals. There are many others that sing, and the question is not always demonstrated as to whether they therefore have a language; people have always talked about this.
The shaman, whose figure I have on a very beautiful little gray bird made by the KWAKIUTL of British Columbia, carries on his back a sort of human image that communicates by a tongue that links him with a frog.
The frog is supposed to communicate to him the language of animals.

There is no need to do so much ethnography since, as you know, Saint FRANCIS spoke to them, to the animals.
He is not a mythical personage; he lived in an age already formidably illuminated in his own time by all the fires of history. There are people who made very pretty little paintings to show him to us at the top of a rock, and one sees all the way to the very end of the horizon fishes’ mouths emerging from the sea to hear him, which all the same, admit it, is a bit much. In this regard one may ask what language he spoke to them. This still has a meaning at the level of modern linguistics, and at the level of modern linguistics and at the level of psychoanalytic experience.

We have learned to define perfectly the function, in certain advents of language, of what is called babyish speech, that thing which for some — for me, for example — gets so much on the nerves: the ‘goo-goo, how cute the little one is’ type.
It has a role that goes well beyond these manifestations connoted with the silly dimension, silliness consisting on the occasion in the adult’s feeling of superiority.

There is, however, no essential distinction between what is called this babyish speech and, for example, a sort of language like what is called pidgin, that is to say those sorts of languages constituted when two spheres of linguistic articulations enter into relation, the holders of one considering themselves to be at once in necessity and in right to use certain signifying elements that are those of the other area, and this with the design of using them to make penetrate into the other area a certain number of communications that are proper to their own area, with that sort of prejudice that it is a matter in this operation of making them take on, of transmitting to them categories of a superior order. These sorts of integrations — between area and area — of language are one of the fields of study of linguistics, and therefore deserve as such to be taken in an entirely objective value thanks to the fact that there exist precisely, with respect to language, two different worlds, that of the child and that of the adult.

We can all the less fail to take it into account, we can all the less neglect it because it is in this reference that we can find the origin of certain somewhat paradoxical traits of the constitution of signifying batteries, I mean the very particular prevalence of certain phonemes in the designation of certain relations called kinship:
The — not universality — but overwhelming majority of the phonemes ‘pa’ and ‘ma’ to designate, to provide at least one of the modes of designation of the father and the mother. This irruption of something that is justified only by elements of genesis in the acquisition of a language, that is to say by facts of pure speech, is explained only precisely from the perspective of a relation between two distinct spheres of language. And you see here the sketching of something that is again the tracing of a frontier.

I do not think I am innovating there since you know what FERENCZI tried to begin to point out under the title ‘Confusion of tongues’, very specifically at this level of the child’s and the adult’s verbal relation. I know that this long detour will not allow me to approach today the function of the ONE, but it will allow me to add to it, for in the end in all this it is only a matter of clearing the ground, namely that you should not believe that where I am leading you is a field that is — in relation to your experience — external. It is on the contrary the most internal field since this experience, the one for example that I evoked a moment ago by name in the concrete distinction here of the other from the Other, this experience we can only pass through.

Identification, namely that which can make, very precisely—and as intensely as it is possible to imagine—that you place under some being of your relations the substance of an Other, is something that will be illustrated in an ethnographic text to infinity, since it is precisely on that that, with LÉVY-BRÜHL, a whole series of theoretical conceptions was built, expressed under the terms ‘prelogical mentality’, and even later ‘mystical participation’, when he was led to center more specifically on the function of identification the interest of what seemed to him the path of objectification of the field taken as his own proper one.

I think here that you know under what parenthesis, under what express reservation alone reports bearing such headings can be accepted. It is something infinitely more common, which has nothing to do with anything that calls logic or rationality into question, from which one must set out in order to situate these facts, archaic or not, of identification as such. It is a fact always known and still verifiable for us, when we address subjects caught in certain contexts that remain to be defined, that these sorts of facts—I am going to title them with terms that jostle barriers, that put their feet in the dish [French idiom: to speak bluntly, to barge in], in order to make it clearly heard that I do not mean here to stop at any partitioning intended to obscure the primariness of certain phenomena—these phenomena of ‘false recognition’, let us say on one side, of ‘bilocation’, let us say on the other, at the level of such-and-such experience, in the relations—to gather the testimonies—abound.

The human being—it is a matter of knowing why these things happen to him, unlike my dog—the human being recognizes, in the emergence of such-and-such animal, the personage he has just lost. Whether it is someone from his family or such-and-such eminent personage of his tribe, the chief or not, president of such-and-such society of youths or anyone else: that is him, this bison is him. Or as in such-and-such Celtic legend, which it is pure chance should come here for me, since I would have to speak for eternity to tell you all that can rise in my memory regarding this central experience.

I take a Celtic legend—which is not a legend, which is a piece of folklore recorded from the testimony of someone who was a servant on a farm. At the death of the master of the place, the lord, he sees a little mouse appear, he follows it. The little mouse goes around the field, it comes back, it goes into the barn where the agricultural implements are, it walks about there on these implements: on the plow, the hoe, the shovel and others, then it disappears. After that the servant, who already knew what it was about concerning the mouse, has confirmation of it in the appearance of his master’s ghost who says to him in effect: ‘I was in that little mouse, I went around the estate to bid it farewell, I had to see the agricultural implements because those are the essential objects to which a soul remains attached longer than to any other, and it is only after having made this round that I was able to go away delivered…’ with endless considerations concerning, on this subject, a conception of the relations of the deceased and certain instruments linked to certain conditions of work, properly peasant conditions, or more specifically agrarian, agricultural.

I take this example to center the gaze on the identification of being concerning two individual appearances so manifestly and so strongly to be distinguished from that which can concern the being who, in relation to the narrating subject, occupied the eminent position of master, with this contingent little animal, going one knows not where, going nowhere.
There is there something which, by itself alone, deserves to be taken not simply as something to be explained, as a consequence, but as a possibility that deserves, as such, to be pointed out.

Does this mean that such a reference can engender anything other than the most complete opacity?
It would be to misrecognize the type of elaboration, the order of effort that I require of you in my teaching, to think that I could in any way be content—even while effacing its limits—with a folkloric reference in order to consider the phenomenon of identification natural. For once we have recognized this as the ground of experience, we know absolutely no more about it, precisely insofar as, for those to whom I speak, that cannot happen, except in exceptional cases.

One must always make a small reservation: be sure that it can still perfectly happen in such-and-such peasant zone.
That it cannot, to you to whom I speak, happen to you, that is what cuts the question. From the moment that it cannot happen to you, you can understand nothing of it and, being able to understand nothing of it, do not believe that it suffices for you to connote the event with a chapter heading, to call it with Mr. LÉVY-BRÜHL ‘mystical participation’, or to make it fit, with the same one, into the larger whole of ‘prelogical mentality’ for you to have said anything interesting. Besides, what you can tame of it, render more familiar with the help of more attenuated phenomena, will not thereby be any more valid, since it is from this opaque ground that you will start.

There again you find a reference to APOLLINAIRE: ‘Eat your feet in the style of Sainte-Menehould’ says somewhere the hero-heroine of The Breasts of Tiresias to her husband. The fact of eating your feet in the Mitsein will settle nothing. It is a matter for us of grasping the relation of this possibility called identification, in the sense in which from there there arises what exists only in language and thanks to language: a truth. In what way this is an identification that is in no way distinguished, for the farm servant who has just told you the experience of which I spoke to you a moment ago, and for us who ground truth on ‘A is A’. It is the same thing because what will be the starting point of my discourse next time will be this: why is ‘A is A’ an absurdity?

The strict analysis of the function of the signifier, insofar as it is by means of it that I intend to introduce for you the question of signification, starts from this, namely that if ‘A is A’ constituted, if I may say so, the condition of an entire age of thought of which the Cartesian exploration with which I began is the term, what one may call ‘the theological age’, it is no less true that linguistic analysis is correlative to the advent of another age, marked by precise technical correlations among which is the mathematical advent—I mean in mathematics—of an extended use of the signifier.

We can perceive that it is insofar as ‘A is A’ must be called into question that we can advance the problem of identification. I indicate to you already now that if ‘A is A’ does not hold, I will make my demonstration turn around the function of the ‘1’, and so as not to leave you totally in suspense and so that perhaps each of you may try to begin to formulate something for yourselves on the path of what I am going to tell you about this, I shall ask you to refer to the chapter of DE SAUSSURE’s Course in Linguistics that ends on page 175.
This chapter ends with a paragraph that begins on page 174 and I read you the following paragraph:

‘Applied to the unit, the principle of differentiation can be formulated thus: the characteristics of the unit merge with the unit itself.
In language, as in every semiological system—this will deserve to be discussed—what distinguishes one sign, that is all that constitutes it. Difference is what makes character, as it makes value and the unit.’

In other words, unlike the sign, and you will see it confirmed if only you read this chapter:
– what distinguishes the signifier is only being what all the others are not,
– what in the signifier implies this function of unity is precisely being only difference,
– it is insofar as pure difference that unity, in its signifying function, is structured, is constituted.

This is not a unary trait, in some way constituted by a unilateral abstraction concerning, for example, the synchronic relation of the signifier. You will see next time, nothing is properly thinkable, nothing of the function of the signifier is properly thinkable, without starting from this that I formulate: the ‘1’ as such is the Other. It is from this, from this foundational structure of the ‘1’ as difference, that we can see appear this origin from which one can see the signifier being constituted, if I may say so, by the fact that it is in the Other that the A of A is A, the big A, as one says the ‘big word’, is let loose.

From the process of this language of the signifier, only here can there begin an exploration that is foundational and radical of that as what identification is constituted. Identification has nothing to do with unification.

It is only by distinguishing it from that that one can give it not only its essential accent, but its functions and its varieties.

Guillaume Apollinaire

HÉLINOR

And the lady? the lady?

LORIE

She will never know the truth.

VOICE OF THE DEAD ENCHANTER

I am dead and cold. Fairies, go away; she whom I love, who is more learned than I myself and who has not conceived by me, still keeps watch over my tomb laden with fine gifts. Go away. My corpse will soon rot and I do not want you ever to be able to reproach me for it. I am sad unto death and if my body were alive it would sweat a sweat of blood. My soul is sad unto death because of my funeral Christmas, this dramatic night when an unreal, reasonable and lost form was damned in my place.

THE FAIRIES

Let us go elsewhere, since all is accomplished, to meditate on involuntary damnation. The fairies went away, and the monster Chapalu, who had the head of a cat, the feet of a dragon, the body of a horse and the tail of a lion, returned, while the lady of the lake shivered upon the enchanter’s tomb.

MONSTER CHAPALU

I meowed, meowed, I met only hooting cats [chats-huants echoes chat-huant, ‘owl’; Apollinaire’s cat-wordplay] who assured me that he was dead. I shall never be prolific. Yet those who are have qualities. I confess I know none in myself. I am solitary. I am hungry, I am hungry. Here I discover a quality in myself; I am famished. Let us look for something to eat.
He who eats is no longer alone. A few sphinxes had escaped from Pan’s pretty herd. They arrived near the monster and, catching sight of his gleaming and clear-sighted eyes despite the darkness, questioned him.

THE SPHINXES

Your luminous eyes denote an intelligent being. You are multiple like ourselves. Tell the truth. Here is the riddle. It is not very deep because you are only a beast. What is the most ungrateful thing? Guess, monster, so that we may have the right to die voluntarily. What is the most ungrateful thing?

THE ENCHANTER

The wound of suicide. It kills its creator. And I say that, sphinxes, as a human symbol, so that you may have the right to die voluntarily, you who were always on the verge of dying.

The sphinxes escaped from Pan’s pretty herd reared up, they turned pale, their smile changed into a horrible and panicked terror, and immediately, claws out, they each climbed to the top of a tall tree from which they hurled themselves down. The monster Chapalu had witnessed the swift death of the sphinxes without knowing the reason for it, for he had guessed nothing. He satisfied his excellent hunger by devouring their twitching bodies. Now, the forest was becoming less obscure. Fearing daylight, the monster quickened the work of his jaws and his licking tongue. And as dawn became poignant, the monster Chapalu fled toward darker solitudes. At daybreak, the forest filled with murmurings and dazzling brightnesses. The songbirds awoke, while the old learned owl fell asleep. Of all the words spoken during that night, the enchanter retained for deepening only those of the deceived druid who went away toward the sea: ‘I am learning to become a fish again.’ He also remembered, to laugh at them, these words uttered by the meowing monster Chapalu: ‘He who eats is no longer alone.’