Two ironies, one of despair, one of contempt. Picard expresses a moment of self-recognition which poses the dilemma of those who wish to find in critical language the common ground, shared with an educated but not specialist public, and dedicated to the notion of ‘making sense’. If there are puzzles, opacities, uncertainties in the reading of a literary work (or even, alas, a text) why not clear them up, make sense of them in such a way that they enter into a common understanding? And why have we reached the point that the most reasonable of procedures is also the most ridiculous? Over the making of sense the image of Homais looms like a bank of fog. It is indeed this common sense which provides for Barthes's polemic the foreground of the ‘bizarre … territory’. For the identified area is one both of the quotidian and the remarkable, where the most ordinary language is involved with the most extraordinary claims. And if there is more to this than the easy play of paradox - in which the most conventional practices of academic tradition are radically ‘defamiliarised’ - one must assess the shaping of a curious historical effect.