ABSTRACT
My theme is frozen discourse, what the French would call discours figé, and the dead but living father. By frozen discourse I mean a discourse that is repetitive, though not obsessively or compulsively so, insistent, constricting, and lifeless, though it may be injected with emotion which stems, however, less from its referents in their immediacy than as a reaction to its stale recitation. Though incited by the particular context in which it occurs, it is not responsive, certainly not creatively responsive, to that context. It so frames its subject matter, indeed the speakers and their interlocutors and their diegetic – in-text – counterparts such that there is little room for escape from the picture it draws, the story it tells, and the way it constructs speakers and interlocutors.1 Turned in on itself, on its reproduction, frozen discourse seems to lead nowhere. It is, I am sure, familiar both in your practice and everyday life.
