ON THE SHINING

‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’: some aspects of The Shining

At the end of the film, Jack Torrance is drawn into the confusion of the maze outside the Overlook Hotel by Danny, his son, whom Jack has been pursuing, possessed as he is by a demonic urge deriving in some way from the hotel itself to do the boy to death with an axe. Danny dupes his father into a vain and ultimately fatal search of the labyrinth by walking backwards through his own footprints, back through his own traces, a duplication whose consequence the following morning makes visible. Seen from slightly above, Jack is sitting with his back against one wall of the maze, frozen into a statuesque pose, rigid in death, like a totem. (The hotel is built on an Indian graveyard.) There is a cut, and the camera tracks through the now deserted Colorado Room towards a wall covered with photographs, closing in on an image of a crowded party. As the camera moves forward, a dance band is heard, in a somewhat tinny recording, inflected with heavy reverberation, as a male singer performs ‘Midnight’. Wearing a tuxedo, Jack Torrance stands in front of the mass of revellers, his face fixed in a smile, looking up at the camera. There is then a dissolve into a closer shot of the image, focusing on Jack. A further dissolve brings him into a yet larger close up, and the camera tilts down to the following inscription, written in white italic script at the bottom of the photograph: ‘Overlook Hotel/July 4th Ball/1921’. The temporal order of the narrative, which hitherto has been established with exemplary and solicitous care, falls at once into disarray, as the image of Jack’s presence in the hotel in 1921 effectively subverts it. (The wall of photographs has been visible in many previous shots. One may wonder whether the photograph of Jack has been there throughout.) With the progression of the narrative thus discredited, the order of time in which the events depicted would make sense drops away, no longer to be trusted. In consequence, the viewer is left with only one time that he can trust, namely the time which the film takes to show itself, the time which the film takes to be seen, to be projected.

That temporal disruption is a condition of how the film is to be seen and understood is indicated within The Shining itself. There is a persistent tendency towards the doubling of both persons and events throughout the film, and the question of how long Jack has been at the Overlook has occurred previously in the narrative, that is, during his meeting with Grady in the red-tiled men’s lavatory. Jack recognises Grady as being the caretaker who in 1970 killed his wife and two daughters, and then killed himself. He has also been told Grady’s story by Ullman, the hotel manager, during the interview. (Note that Ullman refers to Grady as Charles. Grady identifies himself as Delbert.) After repeating all this to Grady himself, Grady denies any memory of the events in question. Jack’s response is forceful: ‘Mr Grady, you were the caretaker here’. In a 180 degree reverse shot, Grady replies, with a precise and menacing courtesy: ‘I am sorry to differ with you, sir, but you are the caretaker. You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir, I’ve always been here’. Jack stares at him, his face unmoving for a moment, then (in medium close-up) he laughs uncertainly. Grady looks back at him impassively, again in reverse shot. Part of the power of this section of the sequence derives from what it suggests of the experience of time lived through by those who have died or been murdered in the Overlook. They have not only died in the hotel—they have died into it, into the possession of what cannot die, so that, like Lloyd the bartender, and ultimately, one may assume, Jack himself, Grady continues to exist in the hotel as an expression of its being. Dying into the Overlook is to have lived there always, to have been there forever, inscribed in an inconclusive futurity of what will have been, a ‘time’ which can never be entirely remembered, since it will never have fully taken place. Thus Grady is puzzled when Jack tells him of the killings, and he seems able to remember little if anything of what he did to his family or to himself, and yet he is there precisely because of the deeds he perpetrated. ‘Where are your wife and children now?’ Jack asks Grady. ‘I don’t rightly know, sir’, is the reply, ‘somewhere about’. The world of horror that Kubrick presents here is one similar to the universe of writing envisaged by Blanchot, in which it is as though one had awakened alive in one’s coffin to the impossibility of death in an existence without exit or escape. (Is this why Grady is able to unlock the foodstore, where Wendy has imprisoned Jack? Grady’s action is not a release from the hotel, but an act undertaken on behalf of the hotel.) It is to experience in the infernal errancy of hell the impossibility of dying, and its time is exactly that of the irredeemable duration of the festivities and balls of the Overlook. The Shining finally conforms to it, as both the film and the celebrations within it surrender to a display of opaque and radiant ambivalence, where end and beginning have ‘always been here’.

Ambiguity of this order is by no means to be discovered in Kubrick’s film only. It is also that of certain modes of literature, including that developed by T.S. Eliot out of symbolisme and exemplified in Burnt Norton. The symbolist procedure in question and its larger significance for an understanding both of what kind of film Kubrick has directed and of what kind of poetry Eliot has written can be indicated by reference to a few lines from Mallarmé’s ‘Prose pour des Esseintes’:

Mais cette soeur sensée et tendre
Ne porta pas son regard plus loin
Que soupire et, comme à l’entendre
J’occupe mon antique soin

A verb in the present tense will necessarily ‘stand for’ an event which occupies the same time, the present time, as the word’s occurrence in the poem. The event of the word’s occurrence in the poem is in effect simultaneous with the event it describes, so that the times of the two events—the event described and the event of the describing of that event—are identical. To create an event in a poem one need only disrupt the sequence of tenses, as Mallarmé does here. By unexpectedly introducing ‘J’occupe’, a verb in the present indicative, into a sentence in which ‘porta’, a verb in the past historic (passé simple), has just preceded it, he surprises the reader into apprehending the shift as an event, precisely because being surprised is internal to the apprehension of an event as eventful. Furthermore, an effect emerges which I have suggested also results from the concluding shots of The Shining: the effect of the surprising present is to break the logical sequence of the tenses, so that the preceding past tenses become suspect also. This disruption of the order of time in which the tenses would make sense means that the discursive order of the poem is discredited, leaving the reader with only one order of time he can trust, that of the poem’s utterance, the time the poem takes to be spoken or read. (It is this conjunction of the two times that Bazin identified with realism, the realism of continuity and the long take. Seen in the context of symbolist aesthetic procedures, it may be Bazin’s thought on the cinema would take on a rather different significance from that commonly attributed to it.) It is a procedure that works to collapse the two times of literary duration into the one time, the time of a pure duration comparable to that of music. Burnt Norton is a poem whose significance derives from its development of the musical aspect of the procedures internal to the syntax of Mallarmé:

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence.

The perceptions at work here—like the perceptions at work in The Shining—are those which lie at the heart of symbolist poetics. Poetry unfolds only in time, in lapsing time: ‘Words move, music moves/Only in time’. We have writing here that does not just seem to make sense: it does make sense. Despite this, however, we must beware of supposing that this passage is consecutive argument. This passage is what it talks about; its structure is musical, not logical. Consider, for instance, the force of ‘but’ in what follows—‘but that which is only living/Can only die’. This means, first, ‘Words, which live in time, must die as we do’; but also ‘We, on the other hand, because we are living as words are not, must die as they needn’t’. Something has been left out across the semi-colon between ‘time’ and ‘but’, which in ordinary usage would limit what follows to one or other of these meanings. But the poet, wanting to have both of them, has left around the semi-colon a meaningful silence, a blank space, an absence whose presence is palpable in the ambiguity the silence opens up. And the next sentence points to yet another reading:

but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence.

As we reach with the words after speech, over the line-end, into the words ‘Into the silence’, we are struck by another sense in which words can be said to die, as when they compose a cadence, a ‘dying fall’—which prolongs itself into the silence after the voice has stopped. This is an effect which poetry shares with music: ‘the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts . . . '. The fiddle and the bow are motionless while the note which their movements created still sounds in the air about them.

Eliot foregrounds a silence that lies between words, the silence that will have preceded the beginning and will return after the end. ‘In my end is my beginning’: when I speak death speaks in me. The work undoes itself—unworks itself—by bringing into the open the silence that it rises from and into which it falls once more, ‘dying’ into what exists before and after it: ‘Ridiculous the waste sad time/Stretching before and after’. In this connection one may speak of literature as being the form in which the original double meaning at the heart of meaning has chosen to show itself, but if one does so one must recognise that here the word ‘meaning’ is itself taking on a doubled or secondary sense. The question of secondary sense is one that Wittgenstein has considered in relation to what he calls ‘the experience of meaning’. It is part of his discussion of the seeing of aspects, for instance seeing an ambiguous figure (‘the duck-rabbit’) now as a duck, now as a rabbit, or seeing a triangle now as a wedge, now as an arrow, and so on. The most important thing about the seeing or dawning of an aspect is that there is a sense in which the aspect isn’t really there and a sense in which it is very much there; a sense in which to speak about ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ with respect to it is to miss its point and yet another sense in which in seeing it and in giving it expression you are truer to the object than if you stick to objective terms—the terms, that is, of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the language-game of reporting’, or ‘the language-game of information’. The seeing involved in aspect seeing is not seeing in general, but seeing (the emphasis is one Wittgenstein employs throughout his discussion). The analogy between seeing aspects and experiencing the meaning of a word is clarified by Wittgenstein when he calls on us to think of the word ‘till’ and mean it as a verb (it might also be meant as a noun, a conjunction or a preposition). This is to abstract the word from its place in the ongoing stream of ordinary usage, so that its meaning may be experienced in isolation from that usage, whilst at the same time the meaning we experience is one that properly belongs to it. To speak of ‘meaning’ in this context is to use the word ‘meaning’ itself in a secondary sense. That is, the word’s use is based not on its primary meaning, which we learn in the process of learning to use language to say what we mean to say (in statements, questions, commands, expressions and so on), but with a sense that seems to force itself on us in the specific context of this language-game, the game of ‘experiencing the meaning’. No other word will do: this use of the word is absolutely the right one in this situation. Another instance of secondary sense is evident in the way ‘yellow’ may be employed to describe the vowel ‘e’, or again, perhaps less trivially, in the way ‘unreal’ can express how the world strikes us in certain mental states akin to depression. These are not metaphors, since there is no other way of expressing what we want to express except this way. A further instance that Wittgenstein draws attention to is the fact that if we repeat a word ten times, say, it will lose its meaning. Here, the ‘experience’ of meaning is the experience of a loss of meaning, as the word, abstracted from any context of use, becomes opaque to us through repetition. In The Shining, Jack’s writing—‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’—is precisely such a repetition, a repetition to which Wendy reacts with extreme fear, since she reads it correctly as a sign that her husband has now removed himself, or been removed by something or someone, from where ordinary human meanings still hold sway.

Wendy is first seen examining Jack’s text, the production of a failed littérateur, from a low angle in front of the table bearing his typewriter, in a shot that is portentous with the suggestion of a horror about to unleash itself. When finally we get to see what his writing consists of, however, it can be seen to exhibit an uncanny beauty, calling to mind the ‘typestracts’ of Dom Sylvester Houédard or the concrete poems of Bob Cobbing. This, then, is the realisation of the ‘writing project’ Jack spoke of to Ullman during the interview. The patterns of typography are suggestive of some sort of sacred configuration. Physically inscribed into the paper by the impact of the typewriter keys and forming an extraordinary combination of shapes and variations, they express a delirious liberation from the laws of ordinary speech and the agency of the speaker. Words themselves are the utterance, rising up unaided and containing their own principle of motivation. Like a ghostly echo (though not, emphatically not, a parody) of music or the Mallarméan poetry of Eliot, Jack’s writing—at once impotent and terrifying—would seem to adumbrate the aesthetic of the film: words are here gathered not into structures of meaning that refer back to the world (something that would hardly be possible, given the vacuous adage he has drawn on) but into a totality of relationships like that of a musical structure whose centre is nowhere and whose circumference is everywhere. As if by magic words themselves have become the agents of his literary act, creating hieroglyphs and ciphers whose meaning can only be a matter of shape. Just as the musical work unfolds between two silences, even as it gives shape to silence without abolishing it, so with Jack’s writing: the potency and the impotence of its textual constellation accrues to it from the spatial and temporal ordering of the filmic world whose motifs of silence and physical presence are choreographed within the enigmatic displacements of the typewritten text.

It is the dynamic of this curious interplay of text and film that finds expression in the many instances of doubling that have often been remarked upon: for example, the doubling with which the film begins—the mountains reflected in the lake—and that with which it concludes—Jack dead in the maze and ‘alive’ in the photograph. Furthermore, it suggests something of the significance of mirrors and of the ‘shining’ itself, which is seeing doubled, just as Danny is doubled by Tony. It suggests the pertinence of the doubling of the hotel in the maze and the maze in the hotel, and of the two Grady girls, as well as the more general question as to whether Jack is going mad or being possessed by the ghostly forces of the hotel. The very word ‘overlook’ has a double meaning: that of seeing from above and that of failing to observe, of missing clues or of letting things go by that perhaps should be punished. The film is conceived around the pattern of doubles, of red and blue, of white and gold, and of actions filmed in mirrors, of words reversed. The doublings exhibited here are not, however, merely the materials of interpretation. They are in effect motifs, which appear and disappear according to the mobility of the film’s temporal patterning of repetition and variation. That this is so appears from Kubrick’s treatment of Jack’s experience in Room 237 (to take but one instance). The first woman he sees as he enters the bathroom is tall and beautiful, coming from behind the shower curtain (allusion to Psycho?) towards him, her face impassive, her posture inviting. Jack, seen in reverse shot, grins lasciviously and walks into her embrace. As he holds her, we see him looking over her shoulder towards a mirror on the wall, in which they are reflected. We cut back to Jack, whose expression changes into a look of incredulity, then horror. There is a cut back to the mirror, and we see that the body he is holding is rotted and decayed. He is in the arms of the cadaver of an old woman. Here there is a cut back to the bath, seen behind the curtain, where the old woman is rising from the water, laughing. She now comes from behind the curtain as the younger woman had done, and moves towards Jack, her face distorted and shrieking with demented laughter. Jack withdraws, gurgling in horror and disgust. Time has here gone backwards, to a point preceding the start of the sequence, to a hitherto unseen moment, that of the hag’s emergence from the bath-water. Whether there are two women, or just one seen under different aspects, one cannot say. What one can say is that as soon as Jack sees the transformed body in his arms, narrative time is disrupted and returned to a moment prior to any so far seen. The doubling of the image results in a doubling of the women’s bodies and a repetition of narrative time. What is unclear from this is the priority that should be ascribed to what we see: do the doublings of time and image generate the narrative events, or do the narrative events engender the doublings? No decision is required, since the sequence precipitates us into the essential ambiguity that is the film’s overriding principle of organisation. The release of narrative time from the demands of the conventional manoeuvres required for intelligibility of action permit precisely the withdrawals and prolongations of motif, theme and resonance that betoken a musical structure

These reflections are such as to bring to mind the ‘scintillations’ that conclude Mallarmé’s sonnet ‘Ses purs ongles’. In this text one participates by means of a sustained series of progressive abstractions and negativities in the traversal of a certain distance, the distance from ‘onyx’, a material which has an appearance of white alternating with black, to a constellation of stars, white on black, glimpsed in the void of a mirror and ‘dans l’oubli fermé par le cadre’. It is in this void that, for unknown reasons, ‘se fixe/De scintillations sitôt le septuor’. The scintillations are to be seen as a constellation, in which the poem allegorises the fact that the words of it do not come together on the basis of a unified movement of meaning such as one finds in utterances organised around identifiably stable syntactic procedures. The principle of organisation would seem to be the use of words, not for their intrinsic meaning, but to mark positions in a pattern of relations—relations that can therefore be thought of as musical. Like the poetry of Burnt Norton, what Mallarmé’s text requires of the reader is that the writing be seen as a musical relationship that is its own motivation, a relationship that for Mallarmé is a constellation. And the perception of such a constellation is precisely what in Kubrick’s film is involved in the perception of the shining. The convergence or analogy is especially apt, since, like the idea of the Mallarméan constellation, the notion of the shining presents itself within the film as incontestable and yet enigmatic.

To think of The Shining as invoking or involving a kind of double seeing is inseparable from the fact that the film is in its fundamental organisation self-reflexive, self-reflexive, that is, in both senses of the word (a further pertinent doubling). On the one hand, its parts reflect and echo one another, as, for example, when Jack is filmed in a mirror early in the film eating his breakfast and discussing with Wendy the nature of the creative process, or when the Colorado Room transforms itself under Jack’s look into the maze, or when the photograph on the wall of the same room reflects and duplicates the dead man seated in the maze. On the other hand, the pattern of internal reflection is itself further duplicated in the film’s self-contemplation, as its shots turn back on themselves, drawing attention to the duration of their elapsing, as the two times of the narrated event and the narrating of that event are collapsed into one. The film is in this way a sustained reflection on its own existence and on the conditions of artistic creation, and during the course of its self-contemplation it presents us at once with an imaginative realisation of the world of the living dead, of the denizens of the Overlook, and a vision of cinematic being as such, of what cinematic existence is. Turned inwards and outwards simultaneously, it reflects its own structure. The shining is not only a power possessed by certain characters in the film (eventually all of the main figures come to have it and to see the dead): it is possessed by the film also. The Shining itself is the shining.

The approach I have been setting out conducting here is based in certain respects on Wittgenstein’s argument that it is intelligible to speak of there being different forms of the presentation of our ‘grammar’ or different ways of looking at how we use words in practice. (‘Grammar’ here refers not to rules of syntax or sentence formation, but to the place our concepts have in our varied and ever-changing forms of life.) The significance of this latter argument is evident, for instance, in Wittgenstein’s contention that the sterile debates of philosophy of mind could be entirely dispensed with if we could free our thought from the grammatical illusion that every sentence must describe something. One might say that his major pursuit as a philosopher was constantly to sketch new possibilities in order to make visible hidden aspects of the use of our words and to encourage us to look at things like this, not like that. What makes a remark a perspicuous representation of ‘the use of our words’ are not its intrinsic features but its function in making our ‘grammar’ perspicuous, by providing, for example, landmarks, patterns, analogies or pictures which enable us to find our way about in the motley of our language. As a result, such a remark need not have one form, and in particular it need not consist in the mere selection and arrangement of grammatical rules (such as ‘this is what we call “adding 2” or ‘this is what we call “red”’). In fact, perspicuous representation in Wittgenstein’s writings can have several radically different forms, exhibiting a diversity of procedures that matches the diversity of procedures for bringing someone to be struck by a new aspect in a drawing, object or person. Thus, we may compare ‘our grammar’ with various ‘clear and simple’ language-games, noting respects of difference or similarity, just as we may compare our use of words for different purposes to how we play games, and so on. No fact is being stated (even about ‘grammar’), and no thesis advanced. What we are concerned with are different ways of seeing things which are offered in particular and specific contexts for particular and specific purposes. The process involved here is not unlike what it is suddenly to grasp the meaning of a pun (as noted above, Wittgenstein compares the dawning of an aspect to the ‘experience’ of the meaning of a word), and it is a task of persuasion rather than argument to bring another to see things differently. So far as the cinema is concerned, Yuri Tsivian has argued that a similar process can be seen in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, insisting that like Poe’s purloined letter Vertov’s ‘statements’ remain invisible until we see the images of the film under a new aspect. [Yuri Tsivian, ‘Man with a Movie Camera, Reel One: a selective glossary’, Film Studies 2 (Spring 2002): 51-76.] To decipher the film one has to alter one’s mental attitude, just as one has to change one’s mental set in order to see in an anamorphic cityscape from 1624 by J.-B. Bracelli the figure of a recumbent woman. (Tsivian gives the illustration on page 57 of his article.) In Vertov’s case, it is the aim of montage ‘by intervals and their correlations’ to bring just such a new attitude about, and one might describe his film as a sustained exercise in aspect seeing. In any event, one can say of perspicuous representation, with reference to either Wittgenstein or Vertov, that whether a representation is perspicuous is not an intrinsic feature of it, but rather a function of its use. It is a representation that makes perspicuous what is represented.

This can be an undertaking of enormous significance. Our forms of representation are deeply embedded in our thinking and even in the pattern of our activities (our forms of life), so that to change a form of representation may well be an overwhelming thing to do. The change in question may require nothing less than a re-orientation of a complete way of thinking, a change capable of bearing with it momentous consequences, as when psycho-physical parallelism is dropped, the unintelligibility of scepticism recognised or the confusion underpinning the distinction between signifier and signified made clear. Such an event of traumatic and uncanny significance takes place in The Shining at the moment of Wendy’s seeing her husband’s writing. From this point on she is aware of the fact that she is confronted by a man who is no longer fully human: under the new aspect which forces itself on her Jack is not what he was, and her subsequent actions follow from this recognition. In this connection one may also bring to mind Heidegger’s discussion of the broken tool or utensil and the reworking of that discussion by Blanchot. The broken utensil, no longer disappearing into the practice of its use and so standing clear of it, is able to appear in its being. Once wrenched out of the typical contexts within which it finds employment, the implement may appear forcibly to us in a particular way, as though it were folding back on itself, becoming its own double, rather as a word abstracted from the stream of life and signifying practice may force on us the ‘experience’ of its meaning. [See note at end.] The damaged object, in a fashion similar to an object that is outmoded or otherwise unusable, surrenders itself to its own image, becoming inseparable from it, and to that extent the damaged object may be seen as an aesthetic object. It is a conception of what constitutes the aesthetic that in relation to language is exemplified by the poetry of Mallarmé and Eliot, for instance, and is developed elsewhere by Blanchot, during an elaboration of the nature of the corpse, the cadaver. For Blanchot, the cadaver presents a materiality that refuses itself to language, being an extreme form of the abject, a something that has fallen (in cadaver we can read cadere) from signification. The cadaver is not of nature or the world and is given in the absence of life: it is the unassimilable other of spirit and meaning, and, like Jack Torrance, it has always been there. As with the tool, so with the corpse: it resembles itself, becoming in death its own image. The relation it had with the world, in which it still appears, no longer exists, and inasmuch as it draws down into itself the life it was once possessed of it loses what it had of truth and value to something that neither is nor is not: the neuter, the neutral. Transforming the life that once animated it into that of which it is now the master, the corpse reigns sovereign over reflected life, changing the life that has been into a pure resemblance, a resemblance that resembles nothing. In Vertigo, Judy is twice ‘made over’ in the resemblance of what is already a doubled image, that of Carlotta Valdez/Madeleine Elster, first by Elster himself, then by Scottie. On each occasion she is made over to resemble a dead woman, Carlotta and then Madeleine—both women who have been—in order to anticipate a death which is yet to come, first Madeleine’s, and then her own. In both cases she is to fall into an abyss, above which, at the film’s beginning, Scottie is suspended, and over which, at its end, he stands. The problematic meanings attaching here to the death of the image—the death the image is and the death the image brings about—may lead us to think also of the cadaverous art of the opening sequences of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The Overlook Hotel has much in common with the House of Usher, as its guests sink like Roderick Usher into an unfathomable nowhere, the here of here lies in which may be read the deictic marker of the neutrality of death. The final image of Jack does not give us a meaning, s summing up of his life and work; it establishes him in a place and time in which meaning withdraws from itself, in accordance with the logic of the temporality that has conformed the style and action of the film to its doubling. The Overlook is not beyond the world, nor is it the world. Its night is not the night, nor is its day the day, and its death is not death either. To reiterate the point I made at the start of the essay, echoing Blanchot, what shows in The Shining is existence without being, without beginning and without end, death as the impossibility of dying. To conclude his film, Kubrick offers an image that surrenders itself and what it represents to the void, fading to black as the song plays on, until what is heard as the credits end is a dissipating ripple of applause echoing out of an eternity which is a nothingness—a nothingness inexorably affirmed in a photograph, enclosed within the hotel, and stretching around outside it, incarnate in a maze and a frozen corpse, a nothingness that is the film’s protagonist.

[Note: To see that tools displaced from their context of use can be aesthetic objects one need only consider the use made by Anders Wolleck of Beverly’s medical instruments for ‘operating on mutant women’ in Dead Ringers.
One may also ask: is the Overlook an hotel? It is empty, void of guests, i.e. closed for the season. One may comment also on the name, Burnt Norton, which Eliot drew on for his poem It derives from a sensational event of the 1740s. Sir William Keyte, a Warwickshire landowner of wealth and standing, had abandoned his wife and children for a young dairy-maid. He dissipated his fortune by laying out a grandiose mansion and gardens, and by lavish hospitality and riotous living (in the manner of Sir Hugo Baskerville). When he was in turn abandoned by his mistress and had fallen into ruin he burned down the house around him, dying in the flames. Only some bones, keys and a gold watch remained. No trace of the original house survives, though its name is now that of the present estates.]

This article was first published as '"Un tiens vaut mieux que deux tu l'auras": quelques aspects de Shining', in Cauchemars américains, edited by Frank Lafond (Liege: Editions du Cefal, 2003), pp. 159-171. The translation of the essay into French was by Frank Lafond.