The publication of Flaubert's Salammbô in 1862 caused an intellectual battle--the so-called "querelle  de Salammbô"--that was almost as heated as any of the battles described within the novel itself.1 Since then the novel has remained, as the Carthage depicted within it, under siege by varying interpretations. What makes the interpretive siege of Salammbô unique is that it must confront an ongoing interpretive struggle within the text itself. Like the Mercenaries who climb the city walls to stare in horror and amazement at the ritualistic self-destruction of their enemies the Carthaginians, interpretations of the novel have the difficult task of coming to terms with the violent struggle of interpretation occurring throughout the text.2 This difficulty necessarily doubles any interpretation of Salammbô. What must be critically addressed is the effort to interpret the struggles of interpretation within the novel.

    One of the most persistent struggles of interpretation throughout the novel is the attempt to understand the enigmatic nature of the gods. For it does seem, as Victor Brombert has rightly claimed, that "the dialectic of the eternal couple, Tanit and Moloch, is indeed at the core of the novel."3 Most critics accept this point to a certain extent. But there still remain unsettled questions about this insight that serves as the founding premise of most interpretations of the novel. Taking for granted the central role of the gods in Salammbô it must be asked to what extent they comprise a dialectic. One could justifiably propose many other readings of Tanit and Moloch for several interpretations of the gods are in contention within the novel itself. The only thing that seems certain here is that the gods, like almost everything else in the text, are organized in terms of opposition. These organizing oppositions constitute a chain that entails such oppositions as the sun/the moon, Mâtho/Salammbô, the Mercenaries/the Carthaginians, male/female, external/ internal, foreign/ familiar, etc. This chain appears to culminate, moreover, in the ever-present opposition between the gods Moloch and Tanit. It thus seems inevitable that interpretations of Salammbô become, to some degree, caught in the difficulty of reconciling the apparently ruling opposition of Moloch and Tanit with the various related oppositions at work in the novel.4 This is not so much a failure as simply a critical necessity. For interpretation can only hope to be equal to the manner in which the text enacts the very struggle of interpretation itself.5

    Regulating the organizational capabilities of this network of oppositions is the notion of sacrilege. Etymologically, sacrilege derives from sacrilegium, from sacer (sacred) and legere (to gather up, take away). Thus the meaning of sacrilegium--the robbing of a temple. Precisely this fundamental form of sacrilege constitutes the central episode of the narrative. This concept, moreover, organizes the opposition between the worshippers and desecrators of the gods Moloch and Tanit. As Moloch and Tanit are Carthaginian gods, they are, naturally enough, worshipped by Carthaginians. The Mercenaries, on the other hand, had served, until the point of their rebellion, the interests of Carthage. When they revolt, however, they renounce everything Carthaginian. Thus the political rebellion against Carthage by the Mercenaries involves just as much religious apostasy. The Mercenaries are, in short, opposed not only to the Carthaginians but also the Carthaginian gods. Moreover, it is arguably in terms of sacrilege that the Mercenaries first begin to perceive themselves as enemies of Carthage. At the very beginning of the novel they express the depth of their aggression towards Carthage by demanding to drink from "les coupes de la Légion sacrée because "c'était un privilège, presque un honneur sacerdotal."6 The Mercenaries then kill the holy fish of Tanit. For "l'idée de commettre un sacrilège ranima la gourmandise des Mercenaires" (49). Following this act "ils n'avaient plus peur." Mâtho and Spendius then achieve the greatest success of the Mercenaries by breaking into the temple of Tanit and stealing the Zaïmph, the sacred veil of Tanit. The Mercenaries's desire to commit sacrilege persists throughout Salammbô. At the end of the novel, just before their very annihilation, "ils rêvaient des sacrilèges encore plus abominables, afin que l'abaissement des dieux puniques fût plus grand. Ils auraient voulu les exterminer" (261). Largely, then, the notion of sacrilege organizes the opposition between the Mercenaries and the Carthaginians. The siege of Carthage that comprises most of the novel's narrative is, in effect, a siege of the gods of the Carthaginians.

    The neatness of the opposition between the Mercenaries and the Carthaginians rests, however, on the reductive opposition between the gods Tanit and Moloch. Matters become more complicated when one considers the extent to which the concept of the divine is interrogated throughout the text. The notion of sacrilege, while organizing these thematic differences, operates within the text in a diffuse and complex manner. In this way the more modern and general sense of sacrilege is at work: the crime of appropriating to oneself, or to secular use, what is consecrated to God or the divine. In this sense sacrilege becomes a problem affecting all figurations of the divine in Salammbô. The breadth of this aspect of sacrilege is suggested in a letter Flaubert wrote during the composition of Salammbô to Madame Roger des Genettes:
 

Mais la manière dont parlent de Dieu toutes les religions me révolte, tant elles le traitent avec certitude, légèreté et familiarité. Les prêtres surtout, qui ont toujours ce nom-là à la bouche, m'agacent. Cest une espèce d'éternuement qui leur est habituel: la bonté de Dieu, la colère de Dieu, offenser Dieu, voilà leurs mots. C'est le considérer comme un homme et, qui pis est, commme un bourgeois. On s'acharne encore à le décorer d'attributs, comme les sauvages mettent des plumes sur leur fétiche. (14: 22)
 

    This problematization of the notion of sacrilege suggests that it is necessary to reassess its organizational role within Salammbô. If to speak of the divine is sacrilege, then the Carthaginians implicate themselves because they discuss and interpret their gods a great deal. Accordingly, they are enacting a form of sacrilege by merely addressing their gods. It will, of course, be necessary to examine Carthaginian interpretations of the gods to prove this observation. But clearly such an examination must approach the so-called fixity of the oppositions in Salammbô with suspicion. It appeared at first, for example, that sacrilege neatly regulated the distinction between the Mercenaries and the Carthaginians. Flaubert's reflection on the gods, however, expressly drew into question the difference between sacrilege and worship. Indeed, it would appear that, for Flaubert, to worship is to commit sacrilege. If the difference between sacrilege and worship is, in fact, moot, then the distinction between the Mercenaries and the Carthaginians would seem to be tenuous. What remains to be explored concerning this issue is to what extent this interpretive sacrilege affects the most deepseated distinction within the novel, the distinction between the gods themselves.

    Most of the detailed information about the gods in the narrative is presented through Salammbô and Schahabarim, "le grand-prêtre de Tanit." For the most part they concern themselves with Tanit, the benevolent deity of Carthage. In an apostrophe to the goddess, Salammbô characterizes Tanit as follows:
 

"Quand tu parais, il s'épand une quiétude sur la terre; les fleurs se ferment, les flots s'apaisent, les hommes fatigués s'étendent la poitrine vers toi, et le monde avec ses océans et ses montagnes, comme en un miroir, se regarde dans ta figure." (75)
 

    This understanding of Tanit, however, is part of the official doctrine of Carthage as presented by Schababarim. Salammbô suggests a different understanding of the divine. As Salammbô proclaims to Tanit: "Mais tu es terrible, maitresse! ... C'est par toi que se produisent les monstres, les fantômes effrayants, les songes menteurs . . . Où donc vas-tu? Pourquoi changer tes formes, perpétuellement?" (75). The specular relation of self-affirmation between man and the goddess depends on ignoring the plurality of the forms of the goddess. Indeed, the reader is told of Salammbô: "Elle ignorait les simulacres obscènes, car chaque dieu se manifestant par des formes différentes, des cultes souvent contradictoires témoignaient à la fois du même principe, et Salammbô adorait la Déesse en sa figuration sidérale" (76-77). Given this possibility the idea of Tanit is greatly complicated. Tanit does not simply reflect back to man himself and his world. Tanit, rather, figures herself as an unfathomable plurality of forms. In light of this, then, the specular relation of man and Tanit invoked by Salammbô earlier reveals itself to be an extreme form of sacrilege. For the vision of alterity that is reduced to a fetishized figure is precisely the vision of the plurality that is Tanit. The reduction of the goddess to a stable figure organizes the threatening plurality of the deity and allows man to appropriate the goddess as something benevolent. With regard to Salammbô's desire to know everything of the goddess, the reader is told: "l'idée d'un dieu ne se dégageait pas nettement de sa représentation, et tenir ou même voir son simulacre, c'était lui prendre une part de sa vertu, et, en quelque sorte, le dominer" (77). Salammbô's worship of Tanit is therefore not merely an appropriation of the deity for secular use, but an outright attempt to dominate the divine.

    Salammbô address to Tanit sums up the deep-rooted complexity underlying the apparently fixed oppositions in the novel. In worshipping the goddess, Salammbô is supposedly establishing the identity and distinctness of both the sacrilegious Mercenaries and the devout Carthaginians, as well as the realms of the secular and holy. But what separates and distinguishes these realms must itself take place within language. The apostrophe to the goddess, that profound attempt to demarcate sacrilege from worship, the secular from the divine, is therefore susceptible to the contingencies of representation. The concept of sacrilege indicates this contingency. For sacrilege, thought in its essence, is the ultimate indifference between sacrilege and worship. As such, sacrilege is both sacrilege and worship and yet neither the one nor the other. This is not due to any ambiguity in either of these concepts. It is, rather, symptomatic of how language must represent its own limits. The demarcation between the secular and the divine is simply one way to express it. Appropriately, language can only figure its own limit as a folding-in of difference into indifference. This very real limit to language, however, virtually refuses figuration. In this indifference there is no ground to be figured, only more figures. To function as revelation, as explanatory elaboration, figures must continually withdraw from this limit of pure figuration where the difference between figure and ground does not exist. Thus the act of demarcating and settling borders-secular or otherwise-reveals itself to be only a perpetuation, if not an intensification, of a struggle to make both figuration and representation possible.

    Given the apparent impossibility of worshipping the various guises of goddess, Salammbô concludes there must be some form of the divinity that organizes the others. There must, in short, be something beyond these figurations of the divine that organizes them and makes them possible.8 She believes this ground of the figurations of Tanit to reside within the temple.
 

Afin de pénétrer dans les profondeurs de son dogme, elle voulait connaître au plus secret du temple la vieille idole avec le manteau magnifique d'où dépendaient les destinées de Carthage. (77)
 

Elle est l'âme de Carthage ... et bien qu'elle soit partout épandue, c'est ici qu'elle demeure, sous le voile sacré. (78)

Schahabarim thus encourages Salammbô to believe that the goddess can indeed be apprehended in her fullness within the secular world. The veil of Tanit should mark precisely where in the secular world the divine can be apprehended. The veil is the threshhold of the divine's revelation. It is both that which conceals the divine and that which, as the last of secular barriers, promises revelation.9 What we learn of the veil and its resting place, however, puts this understanding of the veil into question.10

    As it is presented, the veil of Tanit appears to occupy a space of representational delirium. Incongruous and illogical images and forms fill the temple. In this proximity to the divine, sacrilege impinges upon representation with an intensity that challenges narrative itself.
 

Une lumière éblouissante leur fit baisser les yeux. Puis ils [Mâtho et Spendius] aperçurent tout à l'entour une infinité de bêtes, efflanguées, haletantes, hérissant leur griffes, et confondues les unes par-dessus les autres, dans un désordre mystérieux qui épouvantait. Des serpents avaient des pieds, des taureaux avaient des ailes, des poissons à têtes d'homme dévoraient des fruits, des fleurs s'épanouissaient dans la mâchoire des crocodiles, et des éléphants, la trompe levée, passaient en plein azur, orgueilleusement, cornme des aigles. Un effort terrible distendait leurs membres incomplets ou multipliés. Ils avaient l'air, en tirant la langue, de vouloir faire sortir leur âme; et toutes les formes se trouvaient là, cornme si le réceptacle des germes, crevant dans une éclosion soudaine, se fût vidé sur les murs de la salle. (98)

This movement into the penetralia of the temple participates in the novel's many efforts to unveil and apprehend the divine. These efforts have all been part of an attempt to know, to understand and, ultimately, to appropriate the divine. This moment, however, describes the ultimate form of sacrilege and the most fundamental expression of all the forms of sacrilege practiced throughout the narrative. The investigation of the demarcation of the secular and the divine attempts to discover the secular's ultimate order and struggles to go beyond it. All that constitutes the secular order is present in this space--"toutes les formes se trouvaient là, comme si le réceptacle des germes." Precisely because of this fact, it appears, the understanding of the secular order reaches its limit. The presence of all forms does not lead to a clear and precise apprehension of the secular order. In fact, these forms that seem to be present in too many numbers and with too much variety are "confondues les unes par dessus les autres, dans un désordre mystérieux." This failure to order the secular even at the height of sacrilege-which in its turns seems to require the disordering of representation itself-underscores the necessity and inevitability of interpreting figurations of the divine in Salammbô. To accomplish this ambitious task it is necessary to achieve an understanding of language in its purity, the only way to obtain true knowledge of the secular's ultimate order. Since language is the veil of the divine, its impurity conceals the divine. In its purity language would disclose the divine in its fullness and immediacy.11 It is this dilemma, then, that forms the central focus for interpretations of the divine in Salammbô.

    It would appear, then, that in Salammbô the nearest approximation to the divine are the figurations of the divine. Figurations of the divine are presented throughout the narrative, never the divine proper in its entirety or fullness. This is a fundamental problem for the understanding of the divine. This understanding necessarily entails appropriating the divine for secular use. To be successful, this interpretive sacrilege must therefore be adequate to the thought of the entirety of the divine's possible figurations. It must, in short, figure figuration itself. The space of the veil of Tanit reveals this strategy at work. Once figuration in its essence is determined, it can be demarcated more easily from the divine proper. In this way a space for true alterity could be established that would allow a more precise distinction between the secular and the divine. By means of this distinction the divine could reveal itself to and in the secular. But the necessary first step in this strategy proves to be impossible throughout the narrative. The attempt to ground figuration inevitably involves a disfiguration of language that prevents the strategy of sacrilege from going further, just as the veil participates in the ultimate form of sacrilege, so does it participate in the most crucial ploy of sacrilege. The veil should not only be the ultimate figuration of the divine, but it should also incorporate all the divine's other figurations. This aim, however, is impossible from the outset because the veil is the veil of Tanit. The revelation that the veil might make would not be a revelation of the divine per se. Rather, it would be a revelation of one of the oppositional terms into which the divine is divided. Even this form of sacrilege--which seems already very limited--is frustrated by the veil:
 

Au dela on aurait dit un nuage où étincelaient des étoiles; des figures apparaissaient dans les profondeurs de ses plis: Eschmoûn avec les Kabyres, quelques-uns des monstres déjà vus, les bêtes sacrées des Babyloniens, puis d'autres qu'ils ne connaissaient pas. Cela passait cornme un manteau sous le visage de l'idole, et remontant étalé sur le mur, s'accrochait par les angles, tout à la fois bleuâtre comme la nuit, jaune comme l'aurore, pourpre comme le soleil, ombreux, diaphane, étincelant, léger. C'était le manteau de la Déesse, le zaïmph saint que l'on ne pouvait voir. (99)

The veil, the threshhold of what should be the pure immediacy of Tanit, appears to present again the figural oppositions that run throughout the narrative. It reveals figures of light and darkness, and of the sun and the moon. These are, of course, used consistently in Salammbô as figurations of Moloch and Tanit. Thus the veil fails to permit the revelation of the divine in its pure immediacy. Moreover, it fails to permit the revelation of an element of the divine, Tanit. The veil only presents anew the figural oppositions used in the novel to characterize the divine.

    Given this situation, the very notion of opposition is put into question. In this "oppositional" relation no one term exists in a state of pure difference. Each term contains its own opposite. Opposition appears to be a mere effect of figuration. The implication of this predicament concerning Tanit is not lost on Schahabarim. By tracing the figure of light as it functions in Carthaginian belief, Schahabarim observes that the moon merely reflects the light of the sun. Since the sun and the moon are, in turn, figures for Moloch and Tanit respectively, Schahabarim concludes that Tanit is the mere figure of Moloch, the one true, all-powerful God.
 

De la position du soleil au-dessus de la lune, il concluait à la prédominance du Baal, dont l'astre lui-même n'est que le reflet et la figure; d'ailleurs, tout ce qu'il voyait des choses terrestres le forqait à reconnaitre pour suprême le principe mâle exterminateur.(177)

Thus he exhorts to Salammbô:
 

... elle [la Rabbet] tire de l'autre toute sa fécondité! Ne la voit-tu pas vagabondant autour de lui comme une femme amoureuse qui court après un homme dans un champ? (178)

In drawing this conclusion, Schahabarim seeks to resolve the problem of there being ultimately no pure differences within the oppositions of the gods. Schahabrim admits that the opposition between Moloch and Tanit is not a real one. All apparent oppositions, he reasons, are the result of the self-differentiation of Moloch. Accordingly, the figurations of this divine origin have no status of their own; they seek merely to return to their source and their original state of non-differentiation.

    For Schahabarim, Moloch, precisely because he is presented through Tanit or the secular world, does not allow himself to be worshipped in terms of self-affirmation. The figures of Moloch do not permit man to have a specular relation with them. Rather, all figures of Moloch strive to return to their source, Moloch. The epithet "devourer" is thus appropriate because it is the endless figures of himself that Moloch devours. In Schahabarim's claim, however, there is a curious ambivalence. Schahabarim must invoke "Moloch" and "Tanit"--which are already figurations of this divine realm supposedly beyond opposition--to claim that all figures seek to return, and to merge, with the one universal source of divine and secular figurations. To explain this further, Schahabarim must use a simile, yet another displacement by means of figuration. He compares Tanit and Moloch to a woman chasing a man. All the fecundity of this woman derives from this man yet she desires him, chases him. Will the desire that marks their differentiation end with their figurative union? Schahabarim wants to argue that desire will drive the figure (as female) back to its (male) origin, the god of gods, and that, once there, the difference between the two will vanish. But the possibility remains that the difference between the two will only be further exploited to produce even more figurations of this longing. For this origin can only operate through the figuration of itself. Indeed, that one must figure the return to an origin that is supposedly beyond figuration sums up neatly the paradox of Salammbô. It is precisely this necessity that is explored when Salammbô herself, priestess of Tanit, travels across a field to give herself to Matho, the fi ure of Moloch. As this encounter-itself a figuring of the gods-reveals, there is no return to an origin, only the endless figuration of a return that neither arrives at an origin nor at a resolution of its own movement.12

     The relation between Schahabarim's simile and Salammbô's visit to Mâtho is not coincidental. Salammbô considers Mâtho "maître du zaïmph" and as someone who "dominait la Rabbet" (179). Salammbô reflects: "Schahabarim, en parlent de celui-là, ne disait-il pas qu'elle devait vaincre Moloch? Ils étaient mélés l'un à l'autre; elles les confondait; tous les deux la poursuivaient" (180). Thus Salammbô acts out Schahabarim's simile in traveling to Mâtho. She follows a series of figures to their supposed source: Zaïmph-Tanit-Mâtho-Moloch. Schahabarim himself understands Salammbô's attempt to recover the veil as a figuration of this problem inherent to the thought of the divine. He manipulates Salammbô to sacrifice herself by speaking of the safety of her father and of the republic. But Schahabarim's true concern is to prove to himself the nature of the status of Tanit. Thus we learn:
 

Mais plus Schahabarim se sentait douter de Tanit, plus il voulait y croire. Au fond de son âme un remords l'arrêtait. Il lui aurait fallu quelque preuve, une manifestation des dieux, et dans l'espoir de l'obtenir, il imagina une entreprise qui pouvait à la fois sauver sa patrie et sa croyance. (178)

Schabarim's "proof" is full of the paradox that underlies all interpretations of the divine throughout Salammbô. Schahabarim is distraught at the thought that Tanit is the mere figure of Moloch. To impress this possibility upon Salammbô he uses a simile of a woman chasing a man across a field. As a final test and proof to determine whether this is indeed the case, Schahabarim contrives a plan of sending Salammbô after Mâtho and the veil. He does this with the understanding that Salammbô functions as the figure of Tanit and that Mâtho functions as the figure of Moloch. If Tanit is indeed a powerful deity she should be able to reacquire the veil that is properly hers. What Schahabarim fails to acknowledge is that this proof is itself a complex array of the divine's figurations. Schahabarim is caught in the paradoxical position of attempting to go beyond figure to the one, undifferentiated source of the divine and yet only being able to do so through figuration. The very reflection upon this process must pass through yet more figurations. It is thus not quite clear what the "proof" that Schahabarim has set in motion will ultimately determine about the divine proper.

    In the narrative that follows this scene it does seem that this chain of figures, this series of oppositions, is returning to its source. It does seem that Mâtho and Salammbô, as figurations of Moloch and Tanit, enact neatly the relation between Moloch and Tanit. As the figure of Moloch, Mâtho wants to consume, absorb Salammbô: "ll aurait voulu l'envelopper, l'absorber, la boire" (190). It is in these terms of consumption and devouring that Salammbô speaks to Mâtho of the time he brought the Zaïmph to her: "Tes paroles, je ne les ai pas comprises; mais je voyais bien que tu voulais m'entrainer vers quelque chose d'épouvantable, au fond d'un abime" (191). This is indeed exactly according to the scenario suggested by Schahabarim's simile. But it seems impossible to control the figurations of the divine. Hence Matho explains why he brought the veil to Salammbô.
 

Non! non! c'était pour te le donner! pour te le rendre! Il me semblait que la Déesse avait laissé son vêtement pour toi, et qu'il t'appartenait! Dans son temple ou dans ta maison, qu'importe? n'es-tu pas toute-puissante, immaculée, radieuse et belle comme Tanit!

Et avec un regard plein d'une adoration infinie:
--A moins, peut-être, que tu ne sois Tanit?

"Moi, Tanit!" se disait Salammbô. (191)
 

    The situation is further complicated by Mâtho invoking the moon, the symbol of Tanit, after sleeping with Salammbô. He says of the moon:
 

Ah! que fai passé de nuits à la contempler! elle me semblait un voile qui cachait ta figure; tu me regardais à travers; ton souvenir se mêlait à ses rayonnements; je ne vous distinguais plus! (193)

Throughout the novel the moon is presented as the figure of Tanit. Mâtho, however, compares this figure to a veil, which is portrayed elsewhere in the novel as the figure of the figurations of the divine. But instead of functioning as such, the veil for Mâtho represents, by way of concealment, the figure of Salammbô. This figure, in turn, observes Mâtho while at the same time refusing to disclose itself. The result of this confusion is that these figures--formerly of Tanit--become figurations of Salammbô.

    It must be remembered that at this point the interaction of Mâtho and Salammbô should be revealing something about the gods. As Schahabarim implied, Mâtho and Salammbô function as figurations of the divine. Their meeting should therefore reveal what hierarchy the divine enforces upon the figurations of itself. Schahabarim hopes to demonstrate which figure of the divine stands in the closest relation to the divine. This, in turn, will demonstrate which form of the divine is truly superior. Yet the meeting of Mâtho and Salammbô seems to allow no such determination of the divine. For example, Mâtho gives the veil to Salammbô, arguing that it does not really belong to Tanit but to Salammbô. For Mâtho, both the veil and Tanit are figures of Salammbô. Thus in recovering the veil, Salammbô does not in any way outwit Mâtho. There is no conclusive proof that Tanit is more powerful than Moloch.13 Likewise, it is difficult to argue that Moloch is more powerful than Tanit, since Mâtho gives the veil to Salammbô in a gesture of adoration that conflates Salammbô and Tanit. Mâtho's encounter with Salammbô makes clear that figuration is, ultimately, arbitrary.14 It is, moreover, not arbitrary in a trivial sense. The arbitrariness of figuration, of the relation between figure and ground, is the condition of possibility that enables figuration to function as such.  Disfiguration, deviation, is thereby not a dangerous possibility external to figuration; rather, figuration is always already disfiguration.

    Within the notion of sacrilege that pervades Salammbô there is the persistent problem of coming to terms with the figurations of the divine. Indeed, the difficulty inherent to figuration appears to consume the very distinction between sacrilege and worship. Both sacrilege and worship seem, ultimately, to be ways of figuring the phenomenon of figuration itself. Worship would be that form of figuration that would be deviant from, yet expressive of, that which was figured. Sacrilege, however, would be that form of figuration that would only deviate from, and yet never return to, that which was to be figured. Thus, just as Flaubert understood worship to be simultaneously worship and sacrilege, so did he understand figuration to be simultaneously figuration and disfiguration. Interpretations of the divine in Salammbô are caught in a perpetual performance of this paradox. These interpretations are profound meditations on the complexity of figuration that are themselves consumed by their very subject matter. In the same way interpretations of the novel can rest only momentarily on the assumption of having figured the text. For interpretation, both in and of the text, is an on-going struggle to resolve the indissolubility of figuration and disfiguration.
 

Notes

I For further exploration of this "battle," see Jacques Neefs, " Salammbô, textes critiques," Littérature 15 (1974): 52-69.

2 Veronica Forrest-Thomson has written incisively on this predicament in "The Ritual of Reading Salammbô," Modern Language Review 67 (1972): 787-798. As Forrest-Thomson notes: "In his search for a new pattern, the reader will seize upon any pretext to make the situation of certain characters into a symbol for this attempt to re-order the work; he will also tend to give importance to themes in the book that seem metaphors for such an activity" (787). See also jean Rousset, "Positions, distances, perspectives dans Salammbô," Poétique (1971): 145-154.

3 Victor Brombert, The Novels of Flaubert. A Study of Themes and Techniques (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) 101. For further discussion of images of the divine in Salammbô, see D. L. Demorest, L'expression figurée et symbolique dans l'oeuvre de Gustave Flaubert (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1967) 484488.

4 See Patrick Brady, "Archetypes and the Historical Novel: The Case of Salammbô," Stanford French Review 1 (1977): 313-324. As Brady notes: "They [Salammbô and M5thol are embodiments or incarnations of mysterious, superior forces, whose instruments they are in the working out of vast nonhuman interrelationships" (316).

5 Michal Peled Ginsburg has clearly shown the difficulty these elements of the text pose for interpretation in Flaubert Writing. A Study in Narrative Strategies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). Ginsburg writes: "But since the basic tension in the novel is between familiarity and strangeness, meaning and meaninglessness, an interpretation should encompass both the binary paradigm that attempts to make sense of the text and the characters' experience and whatever it is that subverts this attempt and resists systematization" (114).

6 Gustave Flaubert, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Club de I'Honnête Homme, 1971) 2: 47. Hereafter all references will be to this volume and identified parenthetically by page, unless otherwise noted.

7 For further discussion of the notion of alterity with regard to Salammbô, see Lawrence R. Schehr, " Salammbô as the Novel of Alterity," Nineteenth-Century French Studies 17.3-4 (1989): 326-341. As Schehr notes of the status of the zaïmph: "Precisely because the zaïmph is the object of alterity, it does in fact indicate the novel. It is not in the understandable, though ultimately unproductive series of metaphors and constellations of signifiers that can be abstracted from the figure of the zaïmph: text, texture, tisser, textuality. Rather, it is in the impossibility of description, the multi-plication of folds, the undecidability of the object itself that it signifies the work as a whole" (337-338).

8 This desire for the divinity is part of an act of revenge on the part of the goddess. We learn: "Mais la Rabbet jalouse se vengeait de cette virginité soustraite à ses sacrifices, et elle tourmentait Salammbô d'obsessions d'autant plus fortes qu'elles étaient vagues, épandues dans cette croyance et avivées par elle" (77). This ill-defined, indefinite desire is a revenge, a madness of the goddess. This desire, in turn, becomes a disordering, a derangement of the senses. As Flaubert notes in the plans to the novel: "L'amour est une fatalité des dieux" (309). Flaubert expands on this in the famous "Apologie" to Sainte-Beuve: "L'amour tel que le concevaient les Anciens n'était-il pas une folie, une malédiction, une maladie envoyée par les dieux?" (445). Though not yet to the point of the love of Mâtho that Flaubert speaks of here, Salammbô's desire reveals in nuce the nature of this madness of/from the gods. As Salammbô resents it, this madness is an ill-defined desire, a longing for something to be revealed in its primordial essence. At its highest, this desire seeks to see revealed that which makes all revelation possible-the gods. To contemplate this is doubtless worship; to desire this is madness. To be gods, the gods must remain fundamentally beyond the secular; they must remain other-worldly. The struggle to commit this ultimate sacrilege results in ever more violent struggles between the modes of representing the divine.

9 Martin Heidegger has treated the complex problem that the concept of the divine presents in his essay ~ . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . "' in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). There Heidegger writes:

"For something that man measures himself by must after all impart itself, must appear. But if it appears, it is known. The god, however, is unknown, and he is the measure nonetheless. Not only this, but the god who remains unknown, must by showing himself as the one he is, appear as the one who remains unknown. God's manifestness--not only he himself--is mysterious" (222). Heidegger concludes from this: "God's appearance through the sky consists in a disclosing that lets us see what conceals itself, but lets us see it not by seeking to wrest what is concealed out of its concealedness, but only by guarding the concealed in its self-concealment" (223).

10 For further discussion of the significance of the veil, see Sima Godfrey, 'The Fabrication of Salammbô: The Surface of the Veil," MLN 95 (1982): 1005-1016. As Godfrey notes: "Described in the visual terms of its texture, the zaïmph is ultimately that which cannot be seen-a paradox suggesting that the zaïmph is not but simply does: separates, conceals, reveals, and inspires" (1013). See also Jacques Neefs, "Le Parcours du zaïmph," in Claudine Gothot-Mersch, ed., La Production du sens chez Flaubert (Paris: Union Générale d'Éditions, 1975) 227-41. As Neefs writes: "la série mythique et cosmologique qui traverse le récit et sur laquelle le zaïmph a une place privilégiée, n'est-elle pas simple connotation d'epoque, ornement, ou recherche documentaire sur les religions et les croyances. Mais en elle se répètent ou s'ancrent toutes les oppositions organisatrices. Tanit et Moloch, Lune et Soleil, Salammbô et Mâtho, femelle et mâle, eau et feu, sont pris dans un savoir qui répartit les principes en même temps qu'il est l'histoire de l'origine des différences" (236). Even closer to the claims of this paper is Neefs's argument for the trans-structural status of the zaïmph with regard to the text. I would argue that the status of the concept of sacrilege is likewise trans-structural. For further elaboration of this notion, see the discussion following Neef's article.

11 Jacques Derrida has considered this paradox in D'un ton apocalyptique (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1983). Derrida comments on Kant's discussion of the veil of Isis in Von einem neuerdings erhobenen Vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie, noting that the persistent problem of knowledge based on phenomenal perception insistently raises the specter of literature-that is, of a purely and simply deviant figuration-within the context of philosophy. That phenomenality, in essence, seems incapable of resolving the problems it raises suggests that the veil is the perfect figure for revelation. This is because it makes the deferral of revelation the condition of interpretation. The allegorization of revelation is, therefore, in actuality, revelation thought in its essence. Kant thus helps to make clear that the problem of the veil also provides a scenario for the demarcation of a benign figuration and a figuration that would be without a proper ground or origin. As Derrida writes: "[S]i le voile était absolument mince, et transparent, ce serait une vision, un voir (Sehen), et, note Kant en visant bien impitoyablement, cela doit être évité (vermieden). Il faut surtout ne pas voir, seulement pressentir sous le voile. Alors nos mystagogues jouent du fantôme et du voile, ils remplacent les évidences et les preuves par des "analogies", des "vraisemblances" (Analogieen, Wahrscheinlichkeiten); ce sont leurs mots, Kant les cite et nous prend à témoin: vous voyez bien, cc ne sont pas de vrais philosophes, ils recourent à des schémes poétiques. Tout ca, c'est de la littérature" (44-45).

12 As Jacques Neefs notes in "Le Parcours du zaïmph": "Par son passage d'un camp à l'autre, il [le zaïmph] montre la menace toujours presente d'un renversement d'une série sur l'autre, en même temps qu'il manifeste l'étrange liaison de l'ordre à son Autre" (233).

13 For further consideration of these issues with regard to the ending of the novel, see Peter Starr, " Salammbô: The Politics of an Ending," French Forum 10.1(1985): 40-56. Starr writes: "the ending of Salammbô is an examplary scene in the development of Flaubert's narrative, a scene where an essentially dramatic teleology of plot and an esthetic of victimization-or respectively, an agent of traditional narrative power and a codification of power as an esthetic agent-coexist with strategies of disorganization and doubling, strategies that foreshadow the anti-telic and ostensibly anarchic later narratives" (42).