Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Stereotypes and Representation in Fiction Author(s): Ruth Amossy and Therese Heidingsfeld Reviewed work(s): Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 5, No. 4, Representation In Modern Fiction (1984), pp. 689-700 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772256 . Accessed: 22/02/2012 12:06
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STEREOTYPES AND REPRESENTATION IN FICTION*

RUTH AMOSSY
French, Tel Aviv

As a cultural model through which we perceive, interpret, and describe reality, the stereotype is necessarily linked with representation. Its preconstructed forms provide representation with foundations; they guarantee its possibility and legibility at the same time. This point of view, without any doubt, flagrantly contradicts public opinion, which opposes the stereotype to the accurate reproduction of reality - that is to say, to the "living character," to the "faithful depiction of feelings," and to scenes described as "natural." In every attempt to seize hold of a reality which is by definition diversified and complex, the stereotype would act as a screen and therefore as an obstacle; in this sense it would be the opposite and the negation of representation. The persistent dichotomy between the "real" and the "conventional" is nevertheless, as we know, largely illusory in art. If it is true, as Gombrich (1960) has shown for the plastic arts, that all vision is conditioned by preexisting schemas, it is just as obvious that the literary text relies heavily on accredited models. Between the calm comfort of realistic illusion, and the irritation caused by the stereotype, there is only a very relative distance: that which separates the naturalized model where the reader confuses the stereotyped forms with reality as he sees it, from the prefabricated mold which he denounces as excessive codification and mere distortion of reality. The Russian Formalists' concept of "automatization" was designed to account for this process wherein convention stiffens and congeals. To really understand the stereotype in its constitutive relations with representation in fiction, it is, however, important to go beyond the original notion of automatization. The stereotype does indeed testify to the omnipresence of models which are not simply changeable literary conventions, but global cultural
* Translated by Therese Heidingsfeld. Poetics Today, Vol. 5:4 (1984) 689-700

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forms1 in direct contact with the beliefs (Grivel 1978, 1980-1981, 1981) of a certain society. Moreover, to the extent to which it is based on the activation of determined cultural models, the stereotype stands at the junction of text and reading. It is necessarily reliant on an aesthetics of reception. It thus underlines the centrality of the reading activity, as well as of cultural mediations, in the elaboration of representation in fiction. The aim of the present study is to examine the manner in which the stereotype clarifies from its particular vantage the field of representation, meanwhile defining its own nature and functions within that field. I Right from the outset, however, let us make one thing clear. More than just a cultural model, the stereotype represents a hyperbolic figure of that model. Through exaggeration, it exacerbates and distorts the general rule. It displays itself in the margin of excess where forms become fixed and hardened. A stereotype actually occurs wherever a cultural model allows itself to become recurrent and frozen. This shows at the same time the variability and the great relativity of the phenomenon. The stereotype is not a familiar image, a landmark to be catalogued once and for all. The old miserly Jew, the fair young maiden, the opposition between valiant Anglo-Saxons and evil communists - these are all simply particular concrete forms, and accidental ones at that, of a certain general phenomenon. We are dealing with the capacity of a certain cultural model to repeat itself while being frozen. From this perspective the stereotype can be defined as a recurrent pattern, a prefabricated structure of any kind whatsoever. In a simple form, similar elements maintain a stable relationship from one case to another. It goes without saying that this conception of the stereotype places it from the start beyond or short of - all effort at precise, formal, and unified description. Not only are its contents changeable, but the units and even the relationships which constitute them are essentially variable. Its dimensions are malleable to the nth degree; it is as readily discerned at the level of a brief syntagm, such as "an old miserly Jew," as it is at the level of a character from a novel, such as Isaac of York in Ivanhoe. It appears as readily on the thematic level, such as the development of the "woman-flower" idea, as it does on the formal level, for example whenever "amour" rhymes with "toujours." Finally it shows itself as a global structure underlying the actantial distribution of the narrative or the linking of the series of events. Thus Umberto Eco, in a well-known study of James Bond, noted that in "Fleming's novel, the design assembles the same chain of
1. As certain contemporary semioticians of culture have shown, in a particularly rigorous and suggestive way.

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events and the same secondary characters" (Eco 1966:90). Throughout the proliferation of details and the exuberant technical invention, the same combination is stubbornly imposed: Fleming's novel appears stereotyped at the level of its skeleton, its deep structure. This is also the case with a certain type of serialized novel, or even for the roman a these, in which the rigid, dichotomous distribution of "good guys" and "bad guys" advertises the stereotypicality even of fiction that exploits the most fertile resources of the imagination. We perceive here the fundamental enigma of the stereotype. Delineated at various levels of the text, it can emerge at the exact place where the narrative eludes the trap of literal and narrative repetition and endeavor to erase any visible trace of verbal cliche. Confrontation with the cliche, by the way, underlines the singularity of the stereotype taken in the broadest sense of the term. The trite expression "as miserly as a Jew," which is a lexically full figure felt to be banal, is a discursive, frozen unity (Riffaterre 1971), and as such tolerates neither substitution nor transformation. Therefore it is introduced into the texts as an anonymous quotation (AmossyRosen 1982). This is not at all the case with the stereotype, which goes beyond discursive unity and imposes itself in the most diverse forms.2 The representation of the Jew as an old miser appears as a cultural model in the most disparate novelistic plots. Free and multiform, it welcomes all formulations and variants and puts up with totally dissimilar stylistic registers, decors, and details. It is still, however, perceived as a stereotype in the vivid evidence of reading. Consequently it is the mechanism of this evidence which ought to be unveiled. How do we explain that the same model occurs repeatedly in texts where all the terms can be different? Why is the repetition striking when nothing is reiterated either on the literal level or in the fictional composition? Not only does the stereotype not correspond to any formal, precise definition, but it even bases itself on a paradoxical phenomenon of recurrence. Actually, it is the status of the repetition itself which, as suggested by a recent title by Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (1980), is paradoxical. Repetition, according to the fundamental definition by Genette, constitutes an abstraction, a mental construction obtained by the elimination of the specific qualities of each occurrence and the
2. Cliches and stereotypes are thus both inscribed, each in its own way, in the global field of stereotypicality. Anne Herschberg-Pierrot sees in cliches "a rhetorical sub-category of stereotypes, which embrace, among other ready-made expressions, the fixed figures of style, understood as a particular form of 'preconstruction.' But stereotypes are not reducible to a collection of phraseological units. The fixed associations which they constitute can remain implicit in the language, and indeed need not be verbalized." This description tries to expand the scope of the stereotype as discussed in "Problematiques du cliche" (Herschberg-Pierrot 1980) as a cliche, or as "integration of one or more obligatory predicate definitions within a theme" (p. 336).

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preservation of only those present in similar occurrences. It is thus indissociable from the difference which pervades it. Following, it depends on a mental operation which gives preference to identity and, consequently, erases all trace of diversity. Like repetition, in which it participates, the stereotype is a construction of the mind. It is imposed by a reading activity which divides and reassembles texts in such a way that they flow together into fixed molds. The analysis of a particular example permits us to illustrate this process of elimination and preservation, elision and rearticulation. Here is the portrait of Elie Magus, in Cousin Pons:
And Magus himself was a living picture among the motionless figures on the wall - a little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard,3 and a nose like an obelisk - there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius. A Jew surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles which humanity can give.

The traditional image of the Jew emerges from Balzac's description through a double operation: deconstruction, and reconstruction leading the text towards a preconceived model. All those elements which reinforce the implicit central motif of avarice are selected and taken into account. Thus we find the poverty and dirtiness of the suit: to the "shabby overcoat" is added the waistcoat "renewed twice in a score of years" and the "very dirty" pair of trousers. The "eyes bright" as those of Magus's always greedy dogs, his "bony and emaciated" hands which remind us of the crooked fingers of caricatures - these testify to an insatiable cupidity. A "nose like an obelisk" completes the picture of the old Jew. Such details as the "bald head," the "face full of deep hollows," or the "toothless mouth" remain. To the extent, however, to which they indicate need and are the sign, not only of old age but also of a bizarre "economy," they integrate without difficulty into a unity which gravitates around the notion of avarice. Similarly, the beard "that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles" and the "menacing pointed chin" reinforce the isotopism of the active, that is to say aggressive, cupidity. Here we see the reading strategy which alone permits the imposition of the stereotype. The text is actually refashioned according to the imperatives of a familiar model, exterior to the narrative and recorded in a more or less distinct fashion by the reader's cultural
3. The "bony and emaciated hands" (les mains osseuses et decharnees) have been omitted in this translation by Ellen Marriage.Also note that "wrinkled, callous skin" should be read as "wrinkled, cold skin" (la peau rugeuse et froide). Following excerpts are from Marriage, unless otherwise indicated.

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memory. Reading picks out all the constituents of the description which correspond to the preexisting pattern. In doing this, it trims, prunes, and erases. All nuances which are not immediately relevant are rubbed out. All variants are reduced and reintegrated willy-nilly into the initial isotopism. Take the "nose like an obelisk": according to the dictionary, there are noses which are aquiline, curved, bent, eagle-beaked - but not obelisk-like, unless the connotations of length and Orientality which belong to the obelisk permit us to falsely recognize a Jewish nose. This is also the case with "bony and emaciated hands," an old man's hands, though the context easily permits us to see a miser's hands. Reading thus recuperates the maximum number of variants and differences while working to reduce them to the Same and the Known. Everything that perversely disturbs this harmony of fixed traits reunited in a stable pattern is relegated to the level of "remnants." For the reader forming the stereotype, these remnants are hardly a problem. Whenever reading does not purely and simply skip them, it confers on them the stature of details destined to particularize, to individualize a familiar figure. It neutralizes the remnants without difficulty, either by discerning in them a pure effect of reality or by making all the resorts of realistic motivation work for them. Nothing imposes a "toothless mouth" on the avaricious Jew, but it easily fits an old man and, as well, someone who in his anxiety to economize neglects his clothes and also his body. The "silk waistcoat" is singled out as a superfluous detail, the very uselessness of which guarantees the authenticity of the picture. The picture of avarice accommodates the mention of both a distinguished piece of clothing and the maximal wear and tear on it. The portrait of the avaricious Jew is otherwise corroborated by clothing which confirms his place in the merchant class (and not, for instance, in the working class). By definition, the stereotype therefore limits the reading activity to the recognition of a repetitious structure. Any decoding implies without doubt a reading construction which undoes and reassembles the text. It is based, however, on a game of affinities and differences instigated by the narrative itself. The reading necessitates initial patterns, but it is impossible to know at which one or ones it will terminate; in the case of the stereotype, the construction of the model obeys to a greater extent the reader's automatisms than the more or less complex networks of writing. Reading projects in a false quest what it pretends to seek. The stereotype is potentially lodged in the mind of the reader before being actualized in the text by an act of centralization and reduction.4 We could therefore say that it is the reader and not Elie Magus who carries - or who is - the
4. This conception of reading approaches what Stierle (1979) calls "quasi-pragmatic reading."

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stereotype. For in a sense, the stereotypic reduction or the modulation of differences is a question of reading or, as Barthes (1970:23) says, of rereading: our society, which would have us "throw away" the story once it has been consumed ("devoured"),so that we can then move on to anotherstory, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginalcategoriesof readers (children, old people, and professors),rereadingis here suggestedat the outset, for it alone savesthe text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere),multipliesit in its varietyand its plurality... We know only too well that any text can become the object of stereotyped reading, which brings it back into the same old rut. A protagonist of Balzac, Eugene Sue, Flaubert, or Alexander Dumas could be seen as cast in the same mold. After all, what distance actually separates the description of Elie Magus in Cousin Pons that we have just decoded from the following text: Dressed in worn and filthy clothes, an old Jew with an aquiline nose and crooked fingerscontemplatedhis richeswith eyes that shone with greed. This passage, conceived in terms of the stereotyped reading of Balzac's text, is (need I say it?) of my own invention. The advantage of stereotypic reduction is well-known. The opposite of rereading, which "multiplies" the text "in its variety and its plurality," it comfortably restrains the polysemy. The proliferation of meanings deriving from diverse and complex connections in the novel is replaced by stable relationships which constitute a model invested with Meaning, Meaning which, as has been amply demonstrated, is derived from a diffuse global Knowledge: that of the doxa or public opinion. Here one finds the relation of the stereotype, as conformist representation, to the commonplace or doxic statement. Balzac's text, as well as the caricatural reduction presented above, offers a stereotyped image of the Jew which corresponds to a commonplace idea. This is only indirectly expressed in the ironic commentary inserted by the narrator: "A Jew surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles which humanity can give." It could be reformulated in terms of a general affirmation stipulating that "all Jews are avaricious and eager for gain." In principal, any stereotype can be summarized as a generalization or general truth taken from public opinion. This is because the cultural model underlying it bases itself on a commonplace idea which is clearly formulable or formulated. Evidently arising from beliefs which circulate in a certain society, the stereotype fixes in a stable and suggestive image whatever is thought and said there, whatever manages to state itself explicitly, and whatever disseminates itself insidiously in the deceptive form of the obvious. Stereotyped reading
Reading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of

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allows us to stay on this familiar terrain, where everything has the reassuring form of deja-vu. We have nothing more to learn; we must simply recognize the Same in novelty and difference: the eternal Jew under the particular features of Elie Magus. II We can ask ourselves in this context what a rereading of Balzac's text would involve. Is another dissection possible or, indeed, even necessary? Does writing in the novel provoke, thanks to its own potentialities, a reading construction which surpasses, complicates, or simply ignores the preconceived model of the Jew? In other words, rereading is a process of seeing whether the stereotype is produced by the decoding or by the text. The reading activity which articulates a pattern through, and in spite of, a complex textual expansion can offer an adequate and organized grasp of the essential; but it also risks being a Procrustean bed. To look closely at this question is to ask ourselves about the "left-overs," those elements not "pigeonholed" by the reader when he initially formed - or recognized - the stereotype. Rereading, then, implies the resuppression or recuperation of all elements not immediately relevant to the basic model. Their resistance to recuperation is the best measure of the text's own resistance. Such resistance to attempts at integration and reduction shows that the "recalcitrant" elements violate the three golden rules of stereotyping: the poverty of its constituents, redundancy, and homogeneity. In the revised and corrected portrait of the old Jew which I have outlined, the brevity of description and the extreme poverty of detail permit an immediate recognition of the basic model. The example is, no doubt, somewhat artificial; in the tradition of the novel we more frequently find that details multiply and diversify in order to fill out the plot. So it is necessary for them to be brought under the same umbrella, so to speak, and reinforce a unique global Signified. Redundancy maintains the simplicity of the prefabricated pattern by reducing all the forms of diversity to the Same. As for those elements which evade the law of repetition, they can, as we have seen, be recuperated through various procedures such as individualization, the effect of reality, realistic motivation, et cetera. This is on condition that they be neither completely heterogeneous nor visibly contradictory. Let us imagine for a moment our old Jew blessed with a pair of big blue eyes; Elie Magus showing a face which exudes honesty, or, better still, dressed as a farmer with clogs. Any flagrant deviation upsets the initial pattern in producing unexpected connections which confuse or cover up the fixed relationships of the basic model. Such is the case of Balzac's text, which questions acutely the status of the "left-overs."

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The rest of the portrait of Elie Magus does indeed muddle the stereotype in putting the character into a heterogeneous general category, that of the Parisian "monomaniac":
Paris of all the cities of the world holds most of such men as Magus, strange beings with a strange religion in their heart of hearts. The London "eccentric" always finds that worship, like life, brings weariness and satiety in the end; the Parisian monomaniac lives cheerfully in concubinage with his crotchet to the last.

Balzac then proceeds to describe the "Parisian tribe" as collectors, as millionaires who live in poverty and who "are capable of treading the miry ways that lead to the police-court if so they may gain possession of a cup, a picture, or some such rare unpublished piece as Elie Magus once picked up one memorable day in Germany." The reader who is called upon to unite the traditional image of the Jew with that of the collector, and more particularly with that of the Parisian monomaniac, must produce, with the help of sundry elements in the text, a combination which no longer corresponds to the models he started out with. More and more, the portrait of Elie Magus produces a network of differences even when not juxtaposed with that of the fanatical collector. For it cannot be integrally reduced to the stereotype of the greedy Jew. Balzac's writing brings forth a series of textual connections allowing a totally different decoding. The confrontation of the "little old man" with the "beauty called into being by genius," at which he smiles, suggests a libidinal connection which in a way evokes a well-known "painting": that of Susanna and the three Elders. Magus's indulgence in lewd voyeurism explains "eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs," "a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles," the "menacing pointed chin." Desire is indissociable from physical decrepitude, as is underlined by all the indications of decay and need: "bald head," "toothless mouth," "face full of deep hollows," "bony and emaciated hands," "wrinkled, callous skin." An unusual libidinal investment is thus diverted to the exclusive profit of the work of art. Therein lies one of the essential characteristics of the collector, as the entire novel endeavors to show, starting with its hero Pons. We can also observe that a supplementary axis of decoding is furnished by the contrast offered between the "living picture" of Elie Magus surrounded by his treasures and the "motionless figures" such as the "beauty called into being by genius": the process of opposition and inversion establishes a complex relationship between reality and Art, or Life and Death. Resisting stereotypic reduction, Balzac's text surpasses the familiar model which it used as inspiration. Even when it authorizes a reading centered on the prefabricated pattern, it equally calls for a deciphering that takes into account the unstable and complex networks of the text. Therefore it is a rule-governed interaction of text and

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reader which confers on the stereotype its scope and its limits.5 Behind an image which is only too familiar, the reader who is open to the promptings of the narrative uncovers new connections and meanings. Inversely, it can happen that he uncovers recurrent and frozen patterns in a description or a scene which apparently tries to circumvent them. This is how, for example, Eugene Sue's textual strategies pretend to combat the stereotypicality which, however, constitutes their essential support, as exemplified in the portrait of the old Jew, Samuel, which vehemently attacks all the anti-semitic stereotypes:
Samuel was then eighty-two years old, and despite his advanced age a forest of grey and frizzy hair covered his head; he was small, thin, nervous and the involuntary petulance of his movements proved that the years had not diminished his energy nor his activity, although in the neighborhood, where he only rarely appeared anyhow, he pretended to be senile, as Rodin had said to Father d'Aigrigny. His countenance was filled with intelligence, finesse and sagacity and his large high forehead proclaimed honesty and strength of mind (Translated by Therese Heidingsfeld).

The serialized novel here manifestly refuses to fit into a preconceived mold. Born of the familiar model, it nonetheless is content to disagree with it. The covetous usurer becomes honest and generous; the financial gifts of his race and the art of the hoarder persist, but they are made to serve a worthy end, the making of a fortune for the gentile hero - Samuel discharges an ancestral debt. Moreover, Sue's description ostensibly leans on another prefabricated pattern namely that of the wise and virtuous old man who plays the role of assistant to the hero.6 A very strong redundancy ensures Samuel's possession of the Knowledge and Power necessary to act as wellmeaning Father. In this manner, the narrative which undertakes to shatter prejudices continues in the same old rut of reductive cultural patterns. Paradoxically, far more of the stereotype adheres to Samuel, who demystifies the accredited representations of the Jew, than it does to Elie Magus. When frozen models are only inverted, stereotypicality still triumphs. With this perspective in mind, we can ask ourselves where the stereotype begins and ends in literary representation. From what point does it find itself not only reworked, but even dissolved or pulverized? For the text to really discard it, the stereotype must not recompose itself in an accredited image. This is to say that the text must shift the decoding from the start into an autonomous activity of connections to which no fixed model lends its support. Wherever cultural mediations remain diffuse and underlie the representation
5. For the modalities of text/reader interaction in relation to the "repertoire," the alreadyknown and familiar models, it is useful to consult Wolfgang Iser's (1978) study. 6. Susan Suleiman (1980:129) sees in the redundancy of the actantial function and the qualities attributed to a character the very image of stereotypicality.

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without in any way forcing it into a ready-made mold, one cannot properly speak of a stereotype. From this point of view, we can compare the portrait of Gobseck, a usurer of Jewish ancestry, with the description of Elie Magus:
The man in question was a usurer. Can you grasp a clear notion of that sallow, wan face of his? I wish the Academie would give me leave to dub such faces the lunar type. It was like silver-gilt, with the gilt rubbed off. His hair was iron-gray, sleek, and carefully combed; his features might have been cast in bronze; Talleyrand himself was not more impassive than this moneylender. A pair of little eyes, yellow as a ferret's, and with scarce an eyelash to them, peered out from under the sheltering peak of a shabby old cap, as if they feared the light. He had the thin lips that you see in Rembrandt's or Metsu's portraits of alchemists and shrunken old men, and a nose so sharp at the tip that it put you in mind of a gimlet.

Gobseck is depicted in terms of known models. He derives from the ferret and the gimlet, but also from Talleyrand and Rembrandt's alchemists and old men. In the multiplication of unforeseen and heterogeneous comparisons, any fixed pattern is dissipated in favor of a complex image, a reading construction which must be incessantly particularized and readjusted. III thus appears to be guided by the promptings of the text, to Reading which it lends a more or less sustained attention. However, it can never find absolute guarantees. Margins of incertitude necessarily exist, not because of eventual weaknesses of the interpreter, but because the recognition of any stereotype is largely dependent on a relative factor - namely, the reader's previous knowledge. In other words, the text and the reader must activate the same cultural models. We can wonder how anyone coming from a far-away country where Judaism and anti-semitism are totally unknown would read the portrait of Elie Magus. Here there is a problem of reception with which translations and adaptations are continually confronted. Moreover, the stereotype is left to the discretion of the reader much more often than is generally believed. Actually it is only the attitude of the reader towards the Knowledge which a frozen cultural model makes use of that differentiates the stereotype from what we usually call a type, such as the Miser, the Jew, et cetera. And we all know that the "eternal type" gathers the commendation and praise of the very people who despise the unworthy stereotype in the name of the "living character." From the start we can ask where the difference lies, especially since the type also emerges through a reading activity of building up a pattern or a model which can be summarized in some aphorism or doxic statement. It is precisely this We process of abstraction which confers general value on the type.

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can thus see that the divergence lies elsewhere. It derives from the fact that the relation of the type to Knowledge is considered a relationship with Truth and not an undue subordination to prejudice. The type presents itself as the dramatization of Knowledge, the presentation of an absolute and eternal truth. The text is certainly asked to contribute to the creation of the pattern, but the gap between production and illustration is made relative by the fact that, in the case of truth, there can be no invention ex nihilo. In its essence preexisting all formulation, it requires unveiling and can in this regard repeat itself without deterioration. The notion of a type thus implies not only a general truth, but also the reader's adhesion to the particular truth dramatized in the text. The notion of the stereotype, on the contrary, presupposes the mechanical reiteration of a somewhat suspect Knowledge which in any case is not subject to critical examination or scientific verification. It points out a very relative truth, deriving from a contestable, if not actually contested, world view. It goes without saying that the text may exploit these shifting frontiers at will. Thus Walter Scott takes care, within the framework of the historical novel, to surround his portrait with an entire pseudo-scientific machinery, an absolute doxic armature derived from a supposedly objective insight into History. It is this relationship to Knowledge as Science and consequently as an area of truth which gives to the servile Jew, described throughout the narrative as miserly, the mark of the type and not the contours of the stereotype:
Introduced with little ceremony, and advancing with fear and hesitation, and with many a bow of deep humility, a tall thin old man, who, however, had lost by the habit of stooping much of his actual height, approached the lower end of the board. His features, keen and regular, with an aquiline nose and piercing black eyes, his high and wrinkled forehead, and long grey hair and beard, would have been considered as handsome, had they not been the marks of a physiognomy peculiar to a race which, during those dark ages, was alike detested by the credulous and prejudiced vulgar, and persecuted by the greedy and rapacious nobility, and who, perhaps, owing to that very hatred and persecution, had adopted a national character, in which there was much, to say the least, mean and unamiable.

The portrait of Isaac of York will be considered a type or stereotype of a Jew depending on the degree of the reader's adhesion to the Knowledge invested therein. One final word: it is not only the recognition of the stereotype which is, actually, left to the reader, but its evaluation as well. We are living in a period in which the stereotype has attracted bad publicity. For us the stereotype is the point at which repetition becomes routinization, and complexity becomes the most outrageous schematization. It consolidates and disseminates Meaning, doxa, and the dominant ideology. Undoubtedly, all of this is true if we stick

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to the level of basic definitions. The stereotype, as a recurrent and frozen pattern which can be summarized in a doxic statement culled from public opinion, is necessarily reductive. This does not, however, mean that it is always involved in reductive enterprises or that it is only used for purposes of schematization. What is important to examine are the functions attributable to the stereotype by virtue of its essential characteristics. It does indeed participate in the elaboration of the text as network, in a reworking of models and problematization of commonplace visions of the world. It sets, or at least models, the constitutive interaction of text and reader. We are not concerned here with proposing a defense and illustration of the stereotype, but rather with recommending a functional approach to it, which alone would restore its genuine dimensions and impact. The value of the stereotype depends on the role it plays in the strategies of text and reading: it cannot be fixed once and for all. Let us avoid imprisoning the stereotype within the recurrent and frozen pattern of its own public image.
REFERENCES
Amossy, Ruth and Elisheva Rosen, 1982. Les discours du cliche (Paris: SEDES-CDU). Barthes, Roland, 1974. S/Z , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang). Eco, Umberto, 1966. "James Bond: une combinatoire narrative," Communications 8, 77-93. Even-Zohar, Itamar, 1980. "Constraints of Realeme Insertability in Narrative," Poetics Today 1:4,65-74. Genette, Gerard, 1972. Figures III (Paris: Seuil). Gombrich, E. H., 1960. Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton UP). Grivel, Charles, 1978. "Les universaux de texte," Littdrature 30, 25-50. 1980-1981 "Esquisse d'une theorie des systemes doxiques," Degres, d-d23. 1981 "Savoir social et savoir litteraire," Litterature 44, 72-86. Herschberg-Pierrot, Anne, 1980. "Problematiques du Cliche," Poetique 43, 334-345. Iser, Wolfgang, 1978. The Act of Reading A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP). Marriage, Ellen, trans. The Works of Honore de Balzac (New York: The University Society of Publishers). Riffaterre, Michael, 1971. Essais de stylistique structurale (Paris: Flammarion). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 1980. "The Paradoxical Status of Repetition," Poetics Today 1:4,151-160. Stierle, Karlheinz, 1979. "Reception et Fiction," Podtique 30. Suleiman, Susan, 1980. "Redundancy and the 'Readable' Text," Poetics Today 1:3, 119142.