L'Allusion et l'Accès

L’Allusion et L’Accès follows on from work previously published in GRAAT, in particular Usure et Rupture – Breaking Points (GRAAT 13) and Fonctions du Cliché – Du Banal à la Violence (GRAAT 16). The present conference aimed to articulate the strategies that the literary text deploys to access the unsayable, whilst, simultaneously, keeping in mind the notion of play contained in the etymology of allusion: alludere. Allusion and Access, then, are two vast subjects put into juxtaposition and perspective. Allusion sets up various mechanisms of expression by Indirection while Access gives some sort of Direction although one might not know to where the direction is leading. To Allude means to say something by other means. What is that otherness which one chooses to name by substitution? What is the fundamental otherness to which access leads us, when one is dealing with meaning and is left with language as the only tool? Allusion will be understood as metaphoric play. The receiver is expected to know what the game is all about. As Pizzorusso has well said: «La notion d’allusion demande, ou demanderait, une vaste enquête : le mot, l’idée, la pratique de l’allusion.» Access meanwhile means “to reach” in terms of a path, a progress, implying a hermeneutic search.