The back-and-forth between the world of things and the world of objects is generally what's at stake in any representation. But it is in the tale, where the barrier of verisimilitude and the alibi of realism exert less censorship, that the transformation of things into objects, that the regression or sublimation of objects into things is most acutely highlighted. We will distinguish three levels of analysis:

1. First, there's the story as told; this is the level of the tale proper, which obeys a narrative logic, an explicit level received by the reader, or listener. The narrative logic is a quest logic, based on the journey, the path. However, in the narrative journey, we notice repetitions, variations from the same motif, a sequence.

2. These repetitions make it possible to highlight what makes the story work, its mainspring; this is the level of the narrative, which obeys a structural logic, an implicit level, which only the bringing together of non-contiguous sequences of the narrative can make visible. Structural logic is a logic of indirection: unable to make its purpose explicit, the narrative takes detours and highlights polarities, polarities that generally cover the back-and-forth between things and objects. Repeated motifs implement these polarities, but they do not represent the story's mainspring, which remains veiled, if only to keep the story going. This is why structural logic is a logic of the screen, where the repeated motif functions, vis-à-vis the structural spring of the story, as in psychoanalysis the screen scene vis-a-vis the traumatic shock or the primitive scene, which it both represents and obscures.

3. Why does the narrative take such care to hide, to shroud what it carries within it that is most precious, most profound to signify? This is the level of fiction, which constructs devices, a level that is not only implicit, but even invisible and conjectural, where the actual creation of the work is played out: fiction is external to narrative, which represents it, translates it textually. If the structural spring of the story remains veiled, it can't just be because of the abominations and symbolic prohibitions it contains: what horrors have fairy tales not taken pleasure in representing in the most visible, the most theatrical, the most scandalous way? What the tale hides, and what it feeds on at the same time, so that the tale, like the dream, may never end, is a fundamental contradiction, a symbolic contradiction. We'll show that this contradiction is managed at the level of fiction by what we'll call symbolic doubling, which constitutes the universal and fundamental content of fiction.

We will base our analysis on the study of Incarnat blanc et noir, an anonymous tale from the Cabinet des fées¹, where the double process of circumscription of things into objects, regression of objects into things is exploited to the point of purity.

Tale narrative logic: the repetition of colors

It all starts with an episode that seems to be taken from Chrétien de Troyes' Perceval²:

"The eldest son of a great king was walking alone in winter in a snow-covered countryside. He spotted a crow, on which he signaled his address. The bird fell dead on the snow, staining it with its own blood. The brilliance of its black plumage, the whiteness of the snow and the redness of its blood produced an assemblage of colors that struck the prince."

The starting point of the tale is a double blow. The prince reaches the crow; the brilliance of the colors strikes the prince. The prince is the author of the first wound, of which the love wound, "a violent passion", is only a consequence, a return effect. Yet this original injury is masked in the statement: "He signaled his address. The bird fell dead" avoids explicitly stating that the prince aimed at, struck, hit or killed the bird. This concealment should attract our attention, as a symptom of an unconscious intention, which the narrative will do its utmost to envelop, to disguise.

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The prince's desire crystallizes from the three colors, referred to in the text as "the brilliance of black plumage", "whiteness" and "redness": the three colors are not directly named. They emerge from the reality of things, they have no form, not even a fixed hue: not black, but the brilliance of black; not white, but whiteness; not red, but redness.

The prince's desire, whose first manifestation was a desire to kill (kill the crow), declares itself as desire only in the disseminated form of the thing: "an assemblage of colors", i.e. an unstable, precarious formation, something still halfway between the fortuitous emergence of the real and the haunting, structural return of fantasy; between the intimate, inaugural shock and its unconscious repetition³.

The world of things is a world without distances:

"This idea took such hold of his mind that it was no longer possible to keep it away." (Continued from previous.)

The impossibility of detachment, the fascinated fixation on the thing will recur distressingly throughout the narrative, as a threat of the slide into melancholy⁴ narcissism, the threat of being absorbed by the gaze, where the scopic drive is clearly identified with what constitutes the basis, the foundation of any relationship to the image, namely the death drive. To lose oneself in the contemplation of the three colors is to sink into the spectacle of a metonymy of the first catastrophe, the death of the crow, that is, the death of the bird of death, as Diderot describes it, paraphrasing Homer:

"Your father and mother will not close your eyes. In a moment the crows will pluck them from your head; it seems to me that I see them gathering around your corpse, flapping their wings in joy..."

"It is not so with eyes plucked from the head. I close mine so as not to see those eyes torn out by a crow's beak, those bloody, purulent fibers, half torn from the orbit of the corpse's head, half dangling from the beak of the ravenous bird⁵."

The crow attacking the eyes of the dead man abandoned without burial (in Greek we say εἴς κόρακας, to crows) points, in the gaze, to the powerful and terrifying action of the death drive. It's an impossible image, since the thing only happens to the dead abandoned without a witness; yet it's a foundational image, as if every image only came to cover this nameless horror, that is, to either mediate it or veil it.

The whole story of Incarnat blanc et noir is that of the prince's protest against this death drive imaged by the crow, against this melancholy temptation. Killing the crow, the inaugural act of the tale, already constitutes a reversal of the primitive horror of the thing, of that Homeric scenario invoked in the agonistic face-off, where the warrior announces to his adversary that the crows will pluck out his eyes.

The death of the crow thus aims to ward off the desecration of the dead eyes by the crow; the contemplation of the three colors repeats by displacing this inverted scenario. First, it's a matter of contemplating the dead crow, of making the impossible primitive image possible; then of exporting the image made possible by bringing the springs of metonymy into play: incarnate for blood, white for snow, black for the crow.

Structural logic of narrative: between thing and object

Then, in a new displacement, the prince reacts to the deadly power of the world of things and images by substituting, in the order of discourse this time, the desire for a woman for the vision of the three colors.

"Insensiblement [cette idée] fait naître dans l'cœur une passion violente et qui toute imaginaire qu'elle était, ne lui permettait pas de croire qu'il pouvait être heureux, que lorsqu'il aurait trouvé une personne dont le teint incarnat et blanc serait relevé par des cheveux d'un noir parfait." (Continued from previous.)

The sinuous sentence, the almost sly syntax, mimic the change of register, the formulation in the order of discourse of what had first manifested itself as the vague power of a wordless desire, as pure scopic drive. The desire for a "person" marks the advent of the object relationship, a distanced, separate relationship that replaces the envelopment in the tricolored thing, or more precisely, screens it. The passage to the object, the discursive translation of desire, delimits what was vague, transforming the blurred into the circumscribed: redness becomes incarnate, whiteness becomes white, the brilliance of black becomes perfect black. The object is clean; its colors, its beauty, are functional.

In the narrative, the shift to discourse is signified by the emergence of a voice that "distracts" the prince from his narcissistic absorption: to distract is to separate, to tear away from the thing; the thing, the colors absorb; the voice, the objects distract. To distract is to pose the semiotic break as a distraction of the gaze: no longer to see in order to hear, to turn away from the thing in order to access the distance of the object.

"He was as if absorbed in his deep reflections, when he was distracted from them by a voice that said to him: go, prince, to the empire of wonders, in the middle of an immense forest you will find a tree laden with apples more beautiful and larger than they usually are: pick three of them, and be master enough of yourself not to open them until you return, they will offer you beauty such as you desire." (Continued from previous.)

The device of the tale here contrasts the command of the image, the fixation on the spectacle of the three colors, with the command of the word, which orders the journey, the gathering of the three apples and the suspension of desire. The three injunctions speak of the cut: firstly, the geometrical cut, the geographical cut of the journey by which the prince renounces melancholic absorption; secondly, the imaginary cut of the apples detached from the tree, repeating the gesture of original sin and signifying desire, identifying it with this detachment; thirdly, the symbolic cut that forbids splitting the detached fruit. The opening of the forbidden fruit, which contains a marvellous young girl, clearly signifies sexual penetration; forbidding this opening, or more exactly making this prohibition the qualifying test of the tale, constitutes a symbolic castration.

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The journey, the picking and then the opening of the fruit establish a system of superpositions and equivalences that bring the tale into an economy of metaphor. The bloodied bird, the open apples and the young girls they contain are metaphors for the object of desire⁶. This economy of metaphor is part of the process of transforming the thing into an object: metaphor sets up a screen in front of the thing, from which it is possible to engage in discourse. In contrast, colors bring us back to an economy of metonymy, which sublimates and undoes the object into a thing, crystallizes the image, abysses in the spectacle, denudes the melancholic spring of the death drive.

The prince, then, picks the apples and, of course, transgresses the castration ban: he opens two of the three apples before his return. Each time, "a person" corresponding to the object of his desire emerges highly displeased and immediately disappears, signifying the deceptive transience of jouissance when it is performed in the order of discourse (the journey's route) and the world of objects (the apples) rather than in the scopic order enacted by the contemplation of the three colors⁷. That leaves the third apple:

"He arrived in his country, and having opened the only apple left, a person as beautiful, but sweeter than the other two came out of it. He married her on the spot and found himself the happiest of husbands.

Some time after his marriage, a major war forced him to part ways with the beautiful Incarnat Blanc et Noir. The queen mother, in whose hands this young princess remained, had never approved of this marriage. She had her cruelly put to death, and her body thrown into the castle moat; and, adding the final insult to her wickedness, she assumed in the unfortunate princess's place a person over whom she had absolute power."

The prince's marriage puts only an illusory end to the indefinite repetition of these interrupted enjoyments. The separation by war repeats the cut of the apple, to signify that we are still here in the world of objects, where the cut designates both jouissance and its interruption.

But then, right in the middle of the tale, a new character suddenly emerges who we'll come to understand as the key to, and stake in, the whole tale: it's the queen mother⁸. The queen mother embodies the principle of envelopment proper to the world of things: substituting (supposing, in classical language) her creature for the princess brought back from abroad, she signifies the prohibition for her son of an exogamous object relationship, founded on the radical otherness in which desire flourishes.

The false princess lies at the intersection of the economy of metaphor and the economy of metonymy: "assumed in the place of the unfortunate princess", she screens her but thereby metaphorizes her; an instrument of the queen mother's "absolute power", she constitutes a metonymy of the mother, in whose clutches the son is now enveloped⁹. The death of the princess repeats the death of the crow with which the story opened: in a way, the second half of the story simply repeats the first, with the difference that this time the world of things returns to colonize the entire space of representation.

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Once again invaded by the scopic melancholy of the three colors, the prince, who has been led to believe that the false princess is the real one and that "this metamorphosis must be attributed to the aftermath of childbirth", in effect reconnects with the iconicity of things. Instead of speaking, he dreams; instead of waging war, he plunges into contemplation:

"He spent days and nights dreaming, and very often he remained for whole hours leaning against one of the windows of his palace.

One day while he was in this sad occupation, he spotted in the ditches a fish whose shiny scales were mixed with incarnate, white and black. This object struck him; it was no longer possible for him to lose sight of it."

The word object should not be misleading here. In classical language, it designates the fetishistic crystallization of desire and thus the renunciation of otherness. Behind the fish is the re-establishment of the inaugural spectacle, the vague vision of the three colors. The thing thus returns after the murder of the princess, as a regression to an archaic form of desire, to that vague desire without otherness that the prince's quest and marriage had repressed. The fascination with the fish's scales repeats the inaugural fascination with the dead crow's bloodstains on the snow. We find the same verb frapper ("an assemblage of colors from which the prince was frappé" // "this object the frappa"), which designates the implementation of this logic of attainment characteristic of the world of things. Once again, distance from the object is abolished, separation becomes impossible, scopic fascination fixes the subject to the thing: "this fish, to which the prince was so strongly attached", this fish that "it was no longer possible for him to lose sight of" does not give itself to be seen as a fixed form, but manifests itself as a precarious flicker, as the appearance-disappearance of the three colors with the uncertain favor of the reflection of the scales. This ghostly aura is characteristic of what returns; it cannot be assigned to a precise position; it haunts places.

We find here all the characteristics of fetishism: the obsessive precision of the scopic fantasy (here, the alliance of the three colors) is combined contradictorily with the vagueness, the metonymic fluctuation of the thing desired (here, the iridescence of the scales, the brilliance of their reflection), which triggers in the fetishist the mania for collecting¹⁰. This mania does not appear as such in the tale, where the series of fixations on the three colors (the crow, the apples, the princesses, the fish) is presented as a fortuitous series, as the manifestation of an arbitrary narrative. But structural analysis will interpret this arbitrariness as a signifying necessity, a law of internal organization. And yet, there is no necessity without a cause: the shift from the effect of chance when we are caught up in the narrative to the effect of necessity when we examine the narrative from above must therefore not be seen simply as a kind of artifact of structural analysis. It points to the need for a third level of analysis, where meaning, where the social and symbolic stakes of what structurally orders the narrative, are examined. At this third level, the story is studied not as an unfolding or repetition, but as a device. It is then fiction that is at stake, fiction understood as the symbolic motivation of narrative structures.

The device of fiction as symbolic compromise

Only the Queen Mother is perceptive in this tale, which as innocently stages a perverse fixation. In a way, she embodies both the active principle of the narrative, which the prince is content to undergo, and the external point of view constitutive of the device: only she sees that things are arranged; only she acts on this arrangement, trying to defuse it. Once again, then, it's a question of destroying what the tale calls the prince's attention; attention as one pays attention to, as one directs one's mind towards, as one fixes on a thing and forgets oneself in it.

"The queen mother finding that such marked attention was a sequel to her first passion, resolved again to destroy the subject. She secretly ordered the one who played the princess, and who found herself fat, to say that she had an extreme desire to eat this fish, to which the prince was so strongly attached. It was impossible for her to refuse something that everyone considered to be of such little importance. The fish was caught, served to the so-called queen, and the prince fell back into his former melancholy." (Continued from previous.)

The thing belongs to the oral stage, where desire manifests itself in and through devouring: the princess eats the fish at the instigation of the queen mother, but she herself has been supposed in the place of a young girl emerging from an apple that the prince had picked, but was not to split until he returned to his mother. Even then, there was to be no consumption of either the apple or the woman, oral or sexual, except under the aegis of the mother. This new episode therefore merely displaces, or puts into abyme, the previous elements of the tale.

The consumption of the fish aims to ward off the prince's desire, and indeed he will no longer be able to contemplate its scales; but explicitly warding off this desire, it brings to light another implicit desire, the false princess fulfilling by proxy the queen's unacknowledged cannibal desire, the son's oral envelopment inside the mother.

For what is to be incorporated into this enveloping, distance-less relationship to the thing, if not, for the queen mother whose metonymy the false princess is, her own son, whose fetish the fish constitutes, i.e., in a way the sign¹¹? The consumption of the fish thus achieves, through the double metonymy of the devouring subject (the false princess is the queen's creature) and the thing devoured (the fish is the prince's creature), the incorporation of the son by the mother. We thus see the emergence of the tale's deep and fundamental spring, the incestuous desire of the mother for the son.

From this point on, the metonymic economy goes into overdrive: the scales thrown in the garbage give birth to a tree "which caused the same pleasure to the prince, and consequently the same jealousy to the queen mother". The tree's emergence proceeds from a double repetition, an immediate repetition of the seed scales of which it is the metonymy, and a more distant repetition of the apple tree in the Forest of Wonders, where the prince's desire had once been fixed as an echo of the tree of original sin¹².

"The beautiful tree was uprooted and burned". But its ashes instantly produce "a superb castle" bearing the three colors, a new metonymy for the lost object of desire, the dead princess, who herself screens the dead crow, which we have seen refers to the death drive, anterior and underlying object desire.

We move from the tree to the castle as we had moved from the apple tree to the three apples, to demonstrate the enveloping nature of the fetish, which presents itself to the fetishist only as an endlessly repeated container for an endlessly deferred content. The thing contains the object, which always slips away: the girls were in the apples¹³; the girl will be in the castle¹⁴ .

The penetration into the castle where the real princess is located repeats the opening of the three apples and reiterates the cut of jouissance, which is perpetuated this time thanks to the inversion of the process: it's not the young woman who emerges from the thing in which she's enveloped, it's the prince who enters the thing and settles there definitively. If the tale seems to end happily, it is at the cost of a strangely regressive choice: whereas the whole story was based on the prince's floating between scopic fascination for the tricolored thing and desire for the object, the person of the princess, the completion of the tale marks the triumph of the object only at the price of renouncing the object relation, of the prince's voluntary confinement in the maternal womb represented by the castle: it is in fact the mother's desire that is fulfilled here.

The compromise consists in installing the object in the world of things, enveloping it there, as if it were only possible to escape the mother's jealous desire in her very womb. This strange compromise is, in fact, the logical conclusion to the successive bouts of melancholy that punctuate a narrative marked by the prince's inability to definitively tear himself away from the world of things¹⁵. While the object relation is governed by the pleasure principle, the fascination of things, as we've seen, comes under the death drive, whose secret aim the tale masterfully fulfills here: the regressio ad uterum with which the tale concludes cancels out the detour and expenditure constituted by the prince's life and efforts, the hunt, the journey, the war, the forced cohabitation with the false princess. All these expenditures of energy are attempts by the prince to circumvent his mother's desire and, beyond the desire for incest, to thwart the drive for self-annihilation that it contains¹⁶.

Under cover of a happy ending in a beautiful castle, the tale thus says, behind the demands of the pleasure principle, the omnipotence of death. In so doing, under the guise of bringing them together, it opposes the symbolic institution of desire, the quest for the prince that governs the unfolding of the tale, and the symbolic principle held by the queen mother, the demand for a return to the world of things. Indeed, the Queen's fascination with the three colors does indeed belong to the world of things, but it triggers the dynamic of desire that enables us to escape from it, and constitutes an interface with the world of objects. Destroying what carries the three colors is not to destroy things, but, in things, that which would make it possible to circumscribe objects.

Returning to the functioning of representation, we might say that the narrative logic of the tale is constructed in relation to the symbolic institution (the prince seeks a princess), while the structural logic of the narrative is governed by the symbolic principle (the queen preserves the endogamic continuity of the kingdom). In this story, there are indeed two political powers clashing, but at different levels, which explains why no face-to-face confrontation between son and mother, no dialogue is possible and therefore a fortiori relatable : it is the device of the narrative that will articulate these two contradictory logics, thus implementing the symbolic splitting; the device is a meta-level that escapes narration, what is explicitly narrated, but belongs to fiction, i.e. the making of history. The symbolic institution implements a logic of cut, of separation, which is fulfilled in the journey because the journey enables the sequential cutting of the narrative; the symbolic principle, on the contrary, implements a logic of envelopment, of haunting, which is finally fulfilled in the living imprisonment in the tomb, sublimated here into the happy reunion of the prince and his princess in the tricolored castle.

The question of incest as a narrative mainspring

It may seem risky to base the whole device of this tale on a desire for incest that is never made explicit in the text, a desire for incest that would itself screen the melancholic and profound expression of the death drive. This interpretation is corroborated, however, by the comparison with another tale which, in a completely different cultural context, and without it being possible to establish a philological filiation between the two texts¹⁷, implements an almost identical narrative logic, based on a similar play of metonymic substitutions. But the Egyptian tale articulates these substitutions by means of a discourse with a much more explicit sexual content, the classical propriety of Enlightenment prose, even attenuated by the genre of the tale, not coming here to exercise its censorship.

This is the Tale of the Two Brothers, written by the scribe Ennena or Innana under the kings Merenptah-Siptah and Sethi II, at the end of the 19th dynasty, around 1210 BC¹⁸. The tale begins by recounting how the wife of Anoup, the elder brother, falls in love with Bata, the younger brother, who rejects her. What is at stake in the story - that Bata should marry his brother's wife - is thus masked and will be systematically denied and avoided.

Anticipating a possible denunciation by Bata, Anoup's wife accuses the young man of having tried to seduce her¹⁹ and asks Anoup to kill his brother. Incest is hinted at right from the start of the tale, when the characters are introduced: "Anoup was in charge of a house and a wife. His younger brother lived with him like a son" (p. 161). Anoup's wife therefore falls in love with the man who is like her son, and it is in this capacity that Bata refuses her: "See then, you are for me like a mother and your husband is for me like a father; it is he, my eldest, who brought me up. What you told me would be a great crime; don't repeat it. I won't tell anyone, and I won't let it come out of my mouth to anyone. (P. 162.) It is again the refusal to consummate incest that Anoup's wife claims to have opposed to Bata, when she complains to her husband that he has tried to rape her. She allegedly told him: "Am I not your mother? And isn't your elder brother like a father to you?" (P. 163.)

Faced by his brother who threatens to kill him, Bata once again invokes this incestuous filiation: "I am also your younger brother; you were to me like a father and your wife a mother to me." (P. 164.) But the relationship to incest is no longer so clearly one of horror and avoidance: rather, it seems to recall an innocent, happy past. Bata, pursued by Anoup, resorts to a very singular gesture: he emasculates himself to prove his innocence, and goes into exile far from Anoup, who kills his wife²⁰. Bata's emasculation is redoubled by a second gesture, obscure to us because it refers to Egyptian mortuary rites: Bata rips out his heart, which he places on the flower of a parasol pine, next to which he builds his castle. Anoup is supposed to watch over the pine and the heart from afar.

Shielding native rape

The gods then give Bata the gift of a divine woman, to whom Bata advises never to leave her dwelling: "Do not leave our house to go away from it, so that Yâm²¹ does not take you away; I cannot then save you from him, for I am like a woman too. My heart is laid at the top of the umbrella pine's flower; but if another found it, I would fight him." (P. 166) Bata's ban signifies the symbolic re-establishment of the original brotherhood: emasculated Bata is like a woman, i.e. as he was in his brother's house, where he made the clothes. The pine tree and Yâm represent Anoup's virile power: Bata can do nothing against this power when it is exerted on his wife ("then I cannot save you from him"); on the other hand, if the siblings, symbolized by the pine tree, are attacked from the outside, he will defend them ("if another found [my heart on the umbrella pine], I would fight him"). The prohibition is therefore twofold: Yâm and the pine, adultery and the murder of the brother are forbidden. These are the two prohibitions that Anoup's wife had broken and that Bata's wife will break in her turn.

The tale thus replaces Anoup's wife with the divine woman. In Incarnat blanc et noir the queen had similarly "assumed" her creature in place of the prince's wife. In Le Conte des deux frères, the aim is to reconstitute the blessed assexual sibling from the beginning of the story: the divine woman takes the place of Anoup's wife, while Anoup himself is represented by the pine, the sibling's tutelary tree; by this, the tale signifies that, from the beginning, Anoup was his younger brother's life principle. In both cases, the substitution proceeds from the same imaginary, marvelous disguise of the story's primary data, which triggers the structural mechanism of repetition.

Bata's divine wife leaves her house despite the prohibition and is nearly raped by Yâm. It is indeed here the same rape scene already assumed and invoked by Anoup's wife against Bata that is again evoked and conjured, allowing us to consider the rape of the brother's wife as the original scene²² from which the tale builds the system of substitutions that orders the narrative. The structural logic of Conte des deux frères is in any case different from that of Incarnat blanc et noir, despite the important narrative similarities we're about to highlight. This difference at the level of the narrative is useful for us: what must be masked and elided in one of the tales, what is forbidden as pertaining to the structural core, the originary scene, can on the contrary be made explicit without harm in the other tale, where it does not fulfill this function.

The sea god doesn't rape Bata's wife, but plucks a curl of her hair²³, which he deposits in the washhouse of Pharaoh's palace. The episode of Yâm's attempted rape is somewhat disconcerting: as the young woman took refuge in Bata's house, "Yâm hailed the umbrella pine: Seize her. But the pine took only a braid of her hair." (P. 166.) It's hard to imagine the scene... In any case, it is in some way through what takes the place of a virile substitute for her emasculated husband that Bata's wife is half-raped... The pine tree proceeds from the original sibling, whether it represents Bata himself, as the narration indicates (the pine bears Bata's heart), or symbolizes the virile power of Anoup, to whose custody the pine has been entrusted, as the structural analysis suggests.

Yâm is therefore not a third-party aggressor: operating through the intermediary of Bata's pine tree, Yâm is merely repeating the primitive scene, the rape before the son (Bata) of the one who takes the place of mother for him (the divine woman, substitute for Anoup's wife) by the one who takes the place of father for him (the pine tree, substitute for Anoup)²⁴. So, in a way, the pattern is much more classic this second time than the first.

Pharaoh falls in love with the perfume of the curl, just as the prince in Cabinet of the Fairies falls in love with the three colors; this time it's the smell, not the image, that marks the regression-sublimation to the world of things: "the perfume of this braid permeated Pharaoh's clothes" (p. 166). Like the prince, Pharaoh attempts to convert his fascinated envelopment in the thing into desire and object relations. He abducts Bata's divine bride, just as the prince had gone to pick the three apples. At the instigation of his new wife, who behaves in the same way as Anoup's wife at the beginning of the tale, Pharaoh has Bata²⁵ killed. Pharaoh has thus structurally taken the place of Anoup²⁶, while Bata makes a comeback in various successive forms: each time, it's the same siblings who are implemented, this time at the higher level of the Egyptian kingdom.

In fact, Bata's murder produces the same result as the queen mother's murder of the princess in Incarnat blanc et noir : it triggers a similar succession of repressed returns, with Bata constantly returning by metonymy from his destroyed body.

Between object and thing: the metonymic object

This second metonymic play repeats the first, which substituted the perfume of her hair curl for Bata's wife, in the Egyptian tale, and the alliance of three colors for the dead crow in the Cabinet of the Fairies. At the same time, while the process of metonymic return is identical, its function is reversed. It's no longer a question of undoing the object of desire in fascination for the thing (colors, perfume), but rather of converting the haunting of the thing into the return of the object: a princess for the prince in Incarnat blanc et noir; a brother for the sister-in-law in Le Conte des deux frères.

Bata's dead body is resurrected by Anoup, who makes him drink his heart. Bata is then transformed into a bull²⁷, whose liver²⁸ the pharaoh's new favorite demands and gets to eat. The metamorphosis into a bull corresponds to the metamorphosis into a fish in Le Cabinet des fées : the liver among the Egyptians contains the principle of life, just as the fish, in Christian culture, symbolizes resurrection, because of the play on the Greek word ἰχθὺς, fish, whose letters make it possible to compose the acrostic formula ἰησοῦς χριστὸς θεοῦ ὑιὸς σωτὴρ, Jesus Christ, son of God, Savior. On the other hand, we might think that the choice of the bull is not only a religious reference to the solar cult that identifies Bata with Osiris, but also has a sexual significance, as a virile protest after emasculation. At the same time, the tale's initiatory journey would define the stages of sexual maturation, from assexual siblinghood to symbolic castration, then to virile protest²⁹.

Bata's second metamorphosis is performed from two drops of blood³⁰ projected onto the palace doorposts during the bull sacrifice. The drops give rise to two persea trees, two trees that traditionally designated the refuge of lovers in ancient Egypt: the apple tree in the Cabinet of the Fairies is in some ways the biblical equivalent of the Ennena scribe's persea trees. The tree motif appears twice in both tales: in the Cabinet des fées, it's first the tree where the prince picks the three apples, then the tree in whose fascinated contemplation the prince sinks. In the Egyptian tale, Bata, exiled from his brother, placed his heart at the top of a parasol pine flower. It was from this flower, cut off by Pharaoh's emissaries, that Anoup collected a seed from which the dead Bata was resurrected and transformed into a bull. The two persea trees, symbols of desire, repeat the umbrella pine, symbol of life and death, just as the indeterminate tree born of fish scales repeats the apple tree of the Forest of Wonders. They are two, like the two brothers, which again brings us back to the structural core of the Egyptian tale: again and again, it's the blissful siblings from the beginning of the tale that make a comeback.

The persea trees are felled as the tree in the Fairy Cabinet is uprooted. "The royal consort, the Noble Lady, was standing by, watching this being done, when a chip of wood flew up; it entered her mouth, so that she swallowed it. Thus, in the space of a brief moment, she became pregnant." (P. 170.) The ingestion of the chip repeats the consumption of the bull's liver and explicitly reveals the sexual content of the fish episode in Incarnat blanc et noir : it is indeed a matter of the queen, for whom the false princess is the metonymy, consuming her son, for whom the fish is the metonymy.

Symbolic doubling as a universal issue in fiction

On Pharaoh's death, the child ascends the throne, tells his story and brings to trial the woman who turns out to be both his mother and his wife. For the child is none other than Bata himself, which we only understand incidentally, perhaps because it was obvious to an Egyptian audience familiar with metempsychosis: "they brought his wife; and before the Court he judged her, and the Great Ones gave him their assent. They also brought in his elder brother, who was placed as crown prince in his entire country. Thus Bata spent thirty years as king of Egypt, then sailed to life³¹." (P. 171.)

The tale can be completed thanks to the inversion of the original family structure, Bata and Anoup having swapped places: Anoup becomes Pharaoh Bata's crown prince, i.e. like a son. Incest is said to be a universal abomination because it blurs the succession of generations: here, on the contrary, this blurring is celebrated and magnified as a sign of the timeless perennity of Pharaonic power. Incest in this tale is not repressed, but on the contrary promoted: refused by Bata when Anoup's wife proposes it to him, it is finally fulfilled by the marriage of Bata's son to his mother and the adoption of Anoup as her son. What is not possible on Anoup's farm is, on the contrary, the law in the Pharaoh's palace. Incest here is the sign of Pharaoh's divine distinction, of his functional permanence.

Confronted with the punchline of the Egyptian tale, the punchline of the Cabinet des fées tale appears as the censored, or at least attenuated, representation of the same incest: the entry of the chip into the mouth of the divine woman corresponds to the prince's entry into the castle where the true princess is to be found, opportunely dissociated from the queen mother, so that it does not appear that this final union achieves the disgraced incest. In both tales, the glorious reversal that concludes the narrative marks a return to the origin of the fiction: what is triumphantly achieved at the end by the prince and Bata is, in a sense, only what was shamed and rejected at the beginning. This somewhat disconcerting observation leads us to question the articulation between the different levels of fiction, in order to understand what is at stake in this contradiction.

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We've seen how the narrative is organized as a quest, both a religious and political quest at the end of which the timeless durability of Pharaonic power will be revealed, and a sexual quest in which the consumption of incest makes it possible to escape symbolic castration.

We have shown how the various stages of the narrative process constitute veiled repetitions, variations of an original scene never fully accomplished in the tale, the scene of the rape of the brother's wife: even Bata's metamorphoses, at the end of the tale, screen this original rape. The bull threatens the Noble Lady; the perseas sexually penetrate her through the chip. This system of repetition, which screens an unrepresentable original scene, constitutes the structural spring of the tale.

But the distinction between these two levels of analysis reveals a contradiction, which concerns precisely the status of incest in this story: accepted and even celebrated in the narrative logic of the tale, as the fulfillment of the quest, it is veiled and repelled in the structural logic of the story, as an original abomination, the weight of the fault being borne alternately by each of the three protagonists or their substitutes.

It is Bata who, at the beginning of the narrative, invokes incest to repel Anoup's wife: the setting up of the originary rape presupposes a previous state, a kind of blissful polyandry; Bata's refusal can therefore be interpreted not as a normal reaction to an abnormal and new proposition, but as a new, abnormal reaction to a proposition which, in a previous state, constituted the norm. From then on, the fictional device would consist in superimposing the original polyandry, on Anoup's farm before Bata's inaugural refusal, and the final polyandry, in the pharaoh's palace, after Anoup has been adopted. The intervening episodes, which make up the body of the narrative, institute a symbolic system based on the prohibition of incest, which comes into conflict with what has been posited as the organizing principle and the foundation of happiness.

The symbolic institution introduces an economy of the cut. Bata, pursued by his brother who wants to kill him, invokes the god Re-Horakhty to his rescue: "Re made a great expanse of water appear, which separated [Bata] from his elder brother, a water filled with crocodiles." (P. 164.) Then Bata emasculates himself. Finally, he tears out his heart, which he places on a parasol pine flower. Separating himself from his older brother is tantamount to separating himself from his sex, then from his heart, then from his pine. Bata's life now hangs on the threat of the pine being cut off; Bata identifies with the cut: from a distance, he can tell his brother the truth, then talk to his wife, finally put his mother on trial.

This economy of cut contrasts with the economy of envelopment that characterized the first, incestuous phase of the narrative: Bata "made the clothes for the elder"; Anoup's wife promises Bata to weave him "beautiful clothes". Each envelops the others in the protected space of Anoup's farm. From the moment Bata establishes the new economy, the envelopment does not disappear, but is turned into a fantasy of devouring: first it's Anoup's fear of being devoured by the crocodiles that separate him from Bata; then it's the actual devouring of Bata's sex by a catfish³²: "He fetched a sharp reed and cut off his manly member; he threw it into the water and a catfish swallowed it" (ibid.). The motif of the enveloping garment makes another appearance with the episode of the quarrel of Pharaoh's whiteners, who don't understand where the odor emanating from the curl of Bata's wife's hair comes from: it's through the clothes it impregnates that Pharaoh is enveloped in the vague desire for the feminine thing. Finally, the Noble Lady swallows Bata's metonymic shaving to give birth to her own husband. The envelopment thus makes a triumphant return that brings the tale to a close.

The fictional device articulates the economy of wrapping and the economy of cutting, the world of things (hair, clothes, perfume) and the world of objects (Bata's heart, the umbrella pine), symbolic principle (polyandry, incestuous bliss) and symbolic institution (the refusal of incest, castration). The seed picked up by Anoup and dipped in water to resurrect Bata, the bull and its liver, the persea trees and their shavings are all metonymic objects, i.e. object-things that prepare the way for the return to the first world. The articulation of the two worlds³³ constitutes fiction as a meeting point between two symbolic systems, where human relations, i.e. both hierarchy and communication between men, are conceived differently. Perhaps we should imagine that fiction records the transition from one system to another, preserving in a new world the memory of how an older world functioned. Numerous historiographical studies point in this direction, notably concerning Greek myths, the Homeric epic or the tragedies of the century of Pericles, even if structural anthropology has firmly opposed such an approach³⁴. Perhaps, too, this symbolic splitting, this persistence of a symbolic principle underlying the institution, is a universal characteristic of social functioning, enabling its play and opening up the possibility of its historical transformation.

The symbolic splitting in Incarnat blanc et noir does not implement the same institution, nor the same symbolic principle: there is no question of siblings or polyandry, but of the relationship between mother and son, and the promotion or, on the contrary, the prohibition of incest takes radically different forms and meanings from what is at work in Le Conte des deux frères. Yet we find the same opposition of things and objects, of an economy of envelopment and an economy of severance: these polarities could constitute universal traits, constitutive of all representation.

These traits ensure the evolutionary flexibility of systems of representation; they introduce, into the symbolic structures of culture and society, a dialectical interplay and the possibility of adaptation to new realities. Structural analysis cannot account for this interplay: any symbolic transformation is interpreted as a degeneration of the structural core³⁵ (which it really is) without taking into account, at the higher level of the device, the positive aim of this degeneration, the institution of a new symbolic order.

Notes

Not only the narrative material (the fairy godmother, the dresses, the narrow thing), but the structural core of Cendrillon is the same as that of Peau d'âne, Cinderella, like Donkey Skin, comes from a first marriage, even if the desire for incest is less visible, the play of substitutions being more important (the Gentleman for the King on the one hand, the King's son for the King on the other). Pumpkin or apple, the hollowed-out fruit is a compromise formation between the world of things (confinement within the fruit) and the world of objects (exit from the fruit).

If a stepmother is assumed in place of the mother, this is essentially, in our view, to veil the desire for incest, which is represented in an attenuated form by disguising the figure of the aggressor (the stepmother for the mother, or even the stepmother for the father in Blanche neige where the apple episode is indeed an episode of incestuous seduction).

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It seems more realistic to us to define the tale as a formation of compromise between the most archaic anxieties and desires on the one hand, and the symbolic models that society deems acceptable on the other, so that the tale appears to realize these models while in fact essentially satisfying the archaic demands. If the tale were to ask the child to renounce these impulses, it would not please. As for the "path to a better future", it assumes not only that the story has a happy ending, which is far from always being the case, but that the pleasure of the tale comes from those sweet, plated endings that fool no one, and certainly not children.

Bata's death is signified to Anoup his elder brother in accordance with prophecy by the overflowing of his beer: "You will learn that something has happened to me when having placed in your hand a pot of beer, it will overflow." (P. 165.) The foam does indeed superimpose, through image, the sexual pleasure of ejaculation, and, through meaning, the announcement of death; it figures the little and the big death, it designates the pleasure principle as a screen for the death drive.

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