Deciphering S/ZAuthor(s): Peggy RosenthalReviewed work(s):Source: College English, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Oct., 1975), pp. 125-144Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/375059 .Accessed: 17/10/2012 01:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toCollege English.

http://www.jstor.org

Vol. 37, No. 2 * OCTOBER 1975

College English

CO

E2/S

PEGGY ROSENTHAL

Deciphering S/Z

ROLAND BARTHES' S/Z1 has generally been acknowledged as "brilliant," when it has been acknowledged at all. In this country, acknowledgement has been slight, and usually accompanied by some degree of distrust. Even the American readers who call the book "brilliant" tend to be uneasy about its practical value, while

among those who haven't read it, some have shied away after one look because

they're frankly suspicious of its mysterious style and structure, and others won't

pick it up at all because of their sense that structuralism will impose on them

ways of thinking too foreign to be comfortable and will force them to raise

"unprofitable" questions. I'd like to address all three of these sorts of readers and potential readers of S/Z: to suggest that the nature of Barthes' brilliance makes S/Z of great value to us, a value which we can make as practical as we want; to de-mystify some aspects of the book's style and structure (while admit-

ting the problems they present); and to argue that while structuralism in general and S/Z in particular do impose uncomfortable ways of thinking on us, these

ways aren't as foreign as they appear to be at first. And an acceptance of them can, I think, help free us from some of the limitations of our traditional criticism: limitations in how we define literature, in how we connect literature to what we call "life," in how we connect-or don't connect-our writing to our teaching.

I

What is S/Z? The subtitle is "An Essay," but if you open the book at random, what you see won't meet with your expectations of "an essay." You'll see, on

Peggy Rosenthal has taught English at Wheaton College and is now writing a series of struc- turalist fictions.

IParis: Seuil, 1970. Translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974). Unless otherwise cited, all page references for Barthes will be to the American edition of S/Z.

125

126 COLLEGE ENGLISH

almost any open pair of pages, blocks of writing in a variety of sizes and types: italics; small roman type sprinkled with stars, capitalized abbreviations, and

parenthesized numbers; larger, titled blocks of larger roman type. Between all the blocks of writing (and defining them as blocks) is space-as if the margins have spread into the text, cutting it up. But an image like this, of margins forcing themselves into a continuous text (that is, an essay as we think of one) and break-

ing it up, is misleading, because Barthes' text was never conceived as continuous in the usual sense. He wants S/Z to be the "trace" of an act of reading; and read-

ing, he wants to show, is not the unbroken flow of a single line of thought. What reading is for Barthes is harder to say, but if I can abstract from S/Z and

his other writings something like his theory of reading (which is inseparable from his theory of writing, of language), then the reasons for S/Z's typographical peculiarities will be clearer, since these peculiarities are Barthes' translation of his notion of reading into typographical terms.

Barthes sees all of language as a vast network of lines of speech, of verbal

patterns that are recognizable and that we can even label if we want to. "Network" isn't Barthes' only metaphor for the structure of language, but it's a frequent one, and useful because of several of its implications. It offers an image of three-dimen-

sionality, and of individual lines moving on their own paths but capable of

overlapping in places or of crossing each other at any point. It also suggests the

possibility of infinite extension of individual lines and of infinite movements along them, but also of finite patterns within the infinite network. Any text (any piece of writing) can be seen as one of these finite patterns: a tracing of lines along the infinite network of language.

This notion of "tracing" suggests two possible relations between the text and the network of language, depending on whether "tracing" is given the sense of a noun or a verb. Barthes gives it both senses at different times, and the senses seem contradictory unless we see them as connected in something like the way that a still and a moving picture might be. A "tracing" as a noun shows us the text held still, as if cut from the network: seen this way the text takes part of

language (a particular patterning) out of the network. But seen as a verb, "tracing" is the process of the text passing through the lines of the network. The process isn't quite this simple, though, because Barthes sees it as reversible: the network also passes through the text. This reversibility is intentionally paradoxical: Barthes wants to insist on the impossibility of imagining the text and the network apart from each other. That is, the text becomes the text on passing through the lines of the network, and the network is comprised of all the texts that it

might pass through. After its passage through any one text (or beyond its passage, since the relation is more spatial than temporal), the network continues on its course. And as it continues, it makes possible what we call meanings, which are

arrangements among lines (the French word for "meaning," sens, makes this connection nicely since it's also the word for "direction"). The meanings of a particular text, then, lie in (or rather, glide through) the extensions of its lines outside the text. These extensions are also where the text has its continuity. I said that Barthes doesn't conceive of the text as continuous in the usual sense. "In itself" the text is discontinuous (something cut). But outside itself, in the

Deciphering S/Z 127

network of language, it is continuous: one of the defining features of a network is the continuity of its lines.

In S/Z, Barthes usually refers to the lines of the network as "codes" (or some- times "voices"). "Codes" is a better term than the one I've been using ("lines") because it suggests non-visibility, a patterning force that is itself always unseen, intangible, absent. Barthes' metaphors for "code" emphasize its non-visibility and elusiveness: the code is "a perspective of quotations," "a mirage of structures," "an off-stage voice" (italics mine). These suggestions of an absent patterning force are important because they allow Barthes to use the term "code" to talk also about non-verbal languages (the codes of painting, for example, or of wres-

tling or of everyday life) and also because they prevent (as the term "lines" doesn't) confusing the particular words of a text with the cultural voice or pattern of thought of which these words are an actualization. As Barthes explained at a 1969 conference, "Balzac's description of an old man as one who 'conservait sur ses lkvres bleuatres un rire fixe et arret6, un rire implacable et goguenard comme celui d'une tate de mort,'2 has exactly the same narrative (or more precisely semantic) function as any statement we might create which tells that the old man had something fantastic and funereal about him."3 The Balzac phrase, that is, is

only one of the possible verbal actualizations of fantastic-ness, or of what in S/Z Barthes calls the code of the fantastic.

Since writing is an act of passing through the codes, and in passing through bringing each code into one of its verbal forms, reading is the same act in reverse:

reading is "a traversal of the codes" (p. 71), a movement along the codes in

writing, and further along them out of the text and back into the larger network out of which the text has come. The act of reading is obviously not being defined

psychologically here (as it is, say, by Norman Holland); nor is it defined as

"interpretation" (a reading of a work). Reading a work, for Barthes, means laying out all the possibilities for interpretation that are in the work. S/Z is such an act of reading (or of reading acted out in writing): the reading of a 30-page Balzac

story called Sarrasine. In order to dramatize the reading of the story, in order to show reading as a "traversal of the codes," Barthes has opened up the Balzac text so that the codes that run through it can be seen-that is, can be given a visible form, a labeling that allows us to recognize them and to follow their interweavings. This opening up is in effect a cutting: the Balzac text has been cut into 561

fragments called "lexias" (I'll say something later about the violence of this pro- cess). The lexias, along with the labels for the codes that run through them, and Barthes' explanations of how each lexia is related to the larger system of codes that it's drawn from-these together make up a sort of outline ("trace") of all the meanings that could be seen in the story. But the act of seeing meanings isn't a final act; it too has lines passing through it, out of and back into the network of codes that we call subjectivity. And Barthes also gives us these lines (he calls them "digressions") as they run through his coding of Sarrasine.

2"had on his bluish lips a fixed and frozen smile, implacable and mocking, like a skull" 3"Style and Its Image," in Literary Style: A Symposium, ed. Seymour Chatman (London

& New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 5.

128 COLLEGE ENGLISH

It should be easy now to explain S/Z's typographical peculiarities. The italicized passages (each with an arabic number for reference purposes) are the lexias; the capitalized abbreviations are the labels for the codes, with stars indi-

cating a point at which a code can be seen passing through the story; the small roman type is Barthes' explanations of the codes; the large blocks of

larger roman type (each titled and given a Roman numeral) are the digressions. The typography, that is, allows us to see immediately where in the act of

reading we are. It also gives us a visual representation of Barthes' special notion of structure, but before I can talk about the significance of the book's structure, I have to say more about what is being structured in it. I'm not going to try to describe everything that's going on in S/Z (such an attempt would, anyway, be doomed to failure), but to look at the book from the point of view of Ameri- can literary criticism: to see where it shares our assumptions and methods and where it challenges, even attacks, them. This point of view will necessarily not be that of Barthes himself, since he (in the tradition of French intellectual chauvinism that parallels our own Anglo-American chauvinism) seems to pay almost no attention to Anglo-American criticism, and wrote S/Z in reaction not to us but to both traditional French academic criticism and to some other structuralist criticism. But French and American academic criticism, even though they tend to ignore each other, have much in common, so much that Barthes seems often to be speaking directly to us.

II

What we hear from him, as I've described it so far, probably sounds both familiar and disturbing. The creation of lexias-dividing a text into fragments and letting one's commentary come out of those fragments-sounds a lot like our own method of close reading. And S/Z is in a sense a close reading, though closer than we're used to for fiction: we expect, in the reading of a poem, that

every word will be considered, but we don't expect this of fiction. Partly our

expectation is related to the length of most fiction, which makes the closest close reading unwieldy; but also we don't, I think, expect every word or phrase in fiction to be significant, as we assume it to be in a poem. By printing every word of a prose story and pointing to the significance of all the story's language, Barthes is dramatising his belief that in any use of language "everything signifies something" (p. 51). He's also reacting to the method of some structuralist

literary criticism, as developed for example by Todorov and by Barthes himself in an essay like "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,"4 of

operating on a different level than the text itself, of abstracting meanings from the text (as our own archetypal criticism also does) instead of seeing how

meanings operate in it. This insistence of Barthes' on starting from the text itself and continually

returning to it, of letting one's commentary pass through the language of the

4NLH (Winter 1975). Originally published as "Introduction a l'analyse structurale des r6cits," in Communications, 8 (Nov. 1966).

Deciphering S/Z 129

text itself, is one we're likely to be comfortable with. What's less comfortable is the method by which Barthes cuts up the text in order to pass through, since this method sounds, as Barthes describes and practices it, brutal and arbitrary, a violation of what we like to think of as "the integrity of the work as a whole." And Barthes intends it to sound this way. The text will be broken up, he says, "in the manner of a minor earthquake" (p. 13), and the breaking will be

"arbitrary in the extreme," without regard for the surface of the story. This arbitrariness doesn't matter, because, as he says elsewhere5 of the role of decoupage (dissection) in the structuralist activity, the object to be studied has itself been cut from a system of meaning, and so we can "recreate the course taken by meaning" (refait le chemin du sens) only by repeating this cutting. In the case of a text, the course taken by meaning follows the lines of the whole network of language which runs through the text. And since this network runs through the text everywhere, it will be equally available to us no matter where we cut the text. Where to cut, then, is determined by convenience: "all we require is that each lexia should have at most three or four meanings to be enumerated"

(p. 13). Even if we can accept the necessity for cutting up the text arbitrarily, this no-

tion of enumerating meanings sounds suspiciously reductive. And since one of Barthes' purposes in S/Z is to oppose the reductiveness of most criticism, I need to

explain this apparent contradiction-to explain how, by labeling and counting meanings, Barthes can free the text from the sort of meaning-hunt that tends to

trap it and reduce it to the critic's own terms. Part of the explanation can be found, I think, in Barthes' description of his purpose on the back of the French edition of S/Z: "I have commented, not in order to make intelligible, but in order to know what the intelligible is" (j'ai comment6, non pour rendre intelligible, mais pour savoir ce qu'est l'intelligible). In other words, as Barthes and other structural- ists often say in explaining structuralism's purpose, the aim is not to discover the meaning of an object (a story, a billboard, any human creation), but to discover what makes meaning possible. How, they ask, does any human work come to have what we call meanings? Barthes' answer in S/Z is that a work gets meanings from its relation to the codes that pass through it and, by extension, from the codes' relations to each other; so, in the case of a story, if we can recognize the codes that run through the text and can follow their interweavings, we can "recreate the course taken by meaning."

The codes are, in this sense, analytical tools; and in order to handle them, Barthes sorts the ones he sees in Sarrasine into five kinds--some of which correspond to tools we're already using in our own criticism, and others which offer us new analytical techniques. To begin with the most familiar: what Barthes calls the Semantic Code is what we think of as connotation. In the Balzac passage quoted earlier, for example, we'd say there's a connotation (suggestion, impli- cation) of fantastic-ness or other-worldliness; Barthes codes this passage "SEM. Fantastic. Out of the world." Barthes' Symbolic Code is also familiar to us: it

5"The Structuralist Activity," in Critical Essays (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1972), p. 219.

130 COLLEGE ENGLISH

corresponds to our notion of theme. For example, in Sarrasine the human body is continually being copied, replicated (a castrato inspires a sculptor to make a statue, which is then copied by a painter, whose painting inspires a woman with

passion, and so on). Barthes codes each of the story's references to this copying as "SYM. Replication of bodies"; we'd say that a theme of the story is the

replication of bodies. The other three Codes have no directly comparable terms in American criti-

cism. This is probably because they point to habits of reading, ways of seeing literature, that we haven't developed; and these three Codes are useful, I think, because they show us how to account for some qualities of literature, especially of fiction, for which our own critical vocabulary has been inadequate. What Barthes calls the Cultural Codes or Reference Codes refer to all the voices in a text that come from the current culture-voices for instance of scientific truth or moral authority or folk wisdom or common sense. Any piece of writing (or speech) is full of such voices, but we tend not to hear them because we're used to hearing "voices" in a psychological sense: the voice of a character, or of the narrator, or of the implied author, or of the author-always the voice of a particular person, an individualized psychology. By postulating the existence of cultural (non-personal) voices in a text, Barthes is saying that not all voices are personal and that even when they seem to be, it can be more useful (for purposes of analysis, of understanding) to hear them as the voices of the culture speaking through an individual. For example, take the following sentence, in which the first person narrator describes Sarrasine's expectations before his first

meeting with La Zambinella, the opera star he has fallen in love with:

He had expected a dim room, his mistress seated by the fire, some jealous person nearby, death and love, an exchange of confidences in low voices, heart to heart, dangerous kisses and faces so close that La Zambinella's hair would have caressed his forehead throbbing with desire, feverish with happiness. (lexia 316)

What probably strikes most of us first about the passage is its obvious, even

heavy, conventionality. Noticing that every phrase is a clich6 associated with

lovemaking and that cliche is piled on clich6 to create a sentence that almost sinks under the weight of its conventionality, I think we're forced, as sophisti- cated readers, to ask where this cliched language is coming from and how we can account for our uneasiness with it. Our own critical vocabulary would formulate these questions in terms of the psychology of the speaker: what is the narrator's attitude toward his conventional language? is he blind to his

cliches, or consciously using them to mock Sarrasine's naivete? or is the implied author consciously using them to mock the narrator's (and/or Sarrasine's) naivet6? or is Balzac consciously using them to mock the implied author's (and/or the narrator's and/or Sarrasine's) naivete? or is Balzac even aware of the conven-

tionality of this language? These are the sorts of questions, I think, that our habits of reading wguld

make us ask about this passage, and we wouldn't be able to find answers. How can we know anything about the intentions, the awareness, the attitude of a dead author or of imagined beings (a narrator, an implied author) that have

Deciphering S/Z 131

no existence apart from the words attributed to them? Of course we can't, and yet we want to account somehow for the embarrassing conventionality of the

passage. Barthes suggests a way out of our dilemma by changing the terms of the question asked of the passage. He asks not: who (what individual) is speaking here and what is his attitude toward his language? but: what cultural voices are passing through here and how do they interweave? In this case Barthes hears three voices passing through-the voice of the character's inner feelings (the code of Passion), the voice of the author's sympathy (the code of Fiction), and the voice of the author's mockery (the code of Irony)-and he describes their interaction as a simultaneous "terracing" and "absorbing." The three voices are terraced, separate (because we can hear three disconnected voices) and yet absorbed by each other, inseparable (because they all pass through the same words simultaneously). This interaction of the codes accounts for our uneasiness, our dizziness (even nausea for Barthes, who likes to imagine extreme physical states) when we read the passage. We can't hold the passage still: it's "terraced," not into a solid structure with one layer firmly on top of the other, but into a

continually shifting construction where each layer mingles with and absorbs the others. To indicate the movement of three different cultural codes through this lexia (but not to describe their interweaving, which is done in a digression), Barthes has coded it: "REF. Codes of Passion, Fiction, Irony."

He's also coded it "ACT. 'Hope.': 4: to hope (retrospective reprise)." That is, running through this lexia is not only a group of Reference Codes but also a Code of Action. This Code, and the fifth one (the Hermeneutic Code), are the hardest to translate into our critical terms, because in these two Codes Barthes has separated into two analytical patterns what we usually include together as "plot." I expect that we've all felt the inadequacy of our notions of "plot" when we try to talk about "what happens" in a piece of fiction, about how a story "moves along." The term "plot" suggests lines on a graph, certain points moved through according to a formula; but "plot" also suggests a con- spiracy, the story as an elaborate trick being played. (But by whom and on whom? by the author on the characters? by the author on us? by the narrator on the other characters and/or on us? Several of these permutations, and others, are likely to operate in every story, but our critical vocabulary makes it hard to separate them.) The fact that contemporary authors like Pynchon play with both notions of plot, and force us to see them as interconnected, doesn't make our critical task any easier when we want to know how they're inter- connected, when we want to understand the sequential workings of fiction. Having just one term, "plot," to cover all of these workings frustrates our understanding; it's as if we hadn't discovered the term "narrator," and so had no easy way of distinguishing the character who tells the story from the rest of the characters. Of course we do have some other terms for the sequential workings of fiction- "action," "narrative sequence," "development"--but these are all more or less synonymous with "plot"; they don't point to clearly differentiated conceptions. One of the great services of S/Z is that it gives us sets of terms that are quite clearly differentiated: new analytical tools to help us understand how a story moves through time. I don't mean to imply that Barthes is the first one to have

132 COLLEGE ENGLISH

offered any such tools. The structuralists like Todorov, who are creating a "structuralist poetics,"6 and also our archetypal critics, are working hard to build models that describe narrative structure. What's special about S/Z, and what makes it more useful, I think, if we want to learn about the experience of

reading as it goes along, is Barthes' insistence on always staying in the text, on

seeing sequential patterns operating in the words of the story themselves, not

apart from them on a level of abstraction. To describe in detail the sequential patterns that Barthes sees would take much

too long, but I should say something more specific about how they improve on our notion of plot. I've said that Barthes sees the chronology of a story moving according to two Codes: the Code of Action and the Hermeneutic Code. The Code of Action refers to the patterning of actions according to a sequence that is already known (from everyday experience, from other literature). The action of entering a room, for example, is made up of several possible familiar

sequences: to approach, to penetrate; or to knock on the door, to wait, to

request entrance; or to announce oneself by a sound, the entrance itself; and so on. Each of these sequences is a different "unfolding" of the name to enter; and any action can be seen as a name unfolded, stretched out in time. Once we

recognize what name is unfolding, we know more or less what to expect, since the logic of action is "that of the already-seen, already-read, already-done" (p. 82). (A kidnapping "refers to every kidnapping ever written" p. 20.) If our expectations are frustrated-if a character approaches a house, walks in, and finds herself behind a movie set, as in Robbe-Grillet's Project For A Revo- lution In New York-we know that this fiction isn't operating according to the codes of realism. (I'll say more later about Barthes' definition of realism.)

The Code of Actions accounts for the graphing aspect of plot: it labels the formulas according to which events move in a story. The conspiracy or tricking aspect of plot is accounted for by the Hermeneutic Code, the Code of puzzles. This Code points to the enigmas a story proposes and the patterns by which the

story sustains them and solves them. Enigmas can be relatively simple and quickly solved (who is this character's father?- which we find out in a page or two) or

complex and extended through the entire story (who is this character's father?- which turns into a search for paternity, which can be solved for the reader at a different time than for the characters, and in which case a Code of Action, the search, interweaves with the Hermeneutic Code.) Barthes has broken down the Hermeneutic Code into a series of formal terms which I won't list here, since what I want to emphasize is not the details of any one Code (which a reader of S/Z can quickly see) but the fact that the trick aspect of plot, like the graph aspect and like all the other elements of a fiction, is coded. It moves, that is,

according to a pattern that we can name. Reading, Barthes says several times, is a moving from name to name.

Or from names to names, really, since several codes are almost always operating simultaneously. Writing is "a stereographic space" (p. 21) and Barthes gives us

6Their work is described by Robert Scholes in Structuralism and Literature (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974).

Deciphering S/Z 133

a notation for scoring it. This notation, the labeling and enumerating of codes, doesn't, as Barthes uses it, reduce the text to a system imposed on it and holding it still, but gives us a rigorous way to follow the text as it moves, not only forward in time but out in other directions as well. I say "as Barthes uses it" because the system of codes (like any other system) could be used reductively. But that use would be a misuse, a misunderstanding of Barthes' notion of codes, since his talk always insists on the impossibility of finally pinning them down, or of pinning the text down in them. Weaving through the inventory of the codes (which itself weaves through the Balzac story) are Barthes' digressions, and these not only assert the irreducibility of the codes, but also themselves act out a kind of irreducibility, since Barthes' energy for inventing metaphors, for moving to new verbal positions, seems to be limitless. His own use of language dramatizes what he is saying about language: about its plurality, its slipperiness, its perpetual movement according to rules of infinite regress. In saying this, I'm saying that what most keeps Barthes' system of codes from reductiveness is the play of his own mind through the system. And this is to shift attention from the small type of S/Z to the large type, from the inventory of codes to the digressions: a hard shift to make, since the language of the digressions is very difficult (in ways I'll describe below); but an important shift, because it's in the digressions that Barthes

challenges most directly and dramatically the assumptions of our own critical

language. To make this shift, then, I'll quote from several of the digressions where Barthes talks about the codes and the act of traversing them (the act of reading). My purpose in quoting several passages is both to illustrate what I've been saying about Barthes' treatment of the codes (the movement, the sliding, the suggestion of infinite regress both in his metaphors and in his production of them) and also to provide enough of Barthes' language so that a reader can feel surrounded by it, immersed (possibly drowned) in it, before emerging on the other side-at which

point I'll try to offer some terms other than submersion terms for what reading Barthes puts us through.

(1) To read is to find meanings, and to find meanings is to name them; but these named meanings are swept toward other names; names call to each other, reas- semble, and their grouping calls for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approxi- mation, a metonymic labor. (p. 11)

(2) ... the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances; to take this entrance is to aim, ultimately, not at a legal structure of norms and departures, a narrative or poetic Law, but at a perspective (of fragments, of voices from other texts, other codes), whose vanishing point is nonetheless ceaselessly pushed back, mysteriously opened: each (single) text is the very theory (and not the mere example) of this vanish- ing, of this difference which indefinitely returns, insubmissive. Further, to study this text down to the last detail is to take up the structural analysis of narrative where it has been left till now: at the major structures; it is to assume the power (the time, the elbow room) of working back along the threads of meanings, of abandoning no site of the signifier without endeavoring to ascertain the code or codes of which this site is perhaps the starting point (or the goal) ... (p. 12)

(3) . . . each code is one of the forces that can take over the text (of which the

134 COLLEGE ENGLISH

text is the network), one of the voices out of which the text is woven. Along- side each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard; they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices (whose origin is "lost" in the vast perspective of the already-written) de-originate the utterance: the convergence of the voices (of the codes) becomes writing, a stereographic space where the five codes, the five voices, intersect. . ... (p. 21)

(4) We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a struc- turation. The blanks and looseness of the analysis will be like footprints marking the escape of the text; for if the text is subject to some form, this form is not unitary, architectonic, finite: it is the fragment, the shards, the broken or obliter- ated network-all the movements and inflections of a vast "dissolve," which per- mits both overlapping and loss of messages. Hence we use Code here not in the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted. The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures; we know only its departures and returns; the units which have resulted from it (those we inventory) are themselves, always, ventures out of the text, the mark, the sign of a virtual digression toward the remainder of a catalogue. . ... (p. 20)

III

I expect that someone coming to Barthes for the first time finds these passages not just difficult but unnerving. Barthes wants his writing to be unnerving, not for the sake of perversity, but because he believes, as he says in Critique et Ve'rit6, that "to write is in a way to fracture the world (the book) and to re- make it" (edcrire, c'est d'une certaine faon fracturer le monde (le livre) et le

refaire).7 We might feel, on a first encounter with Barthes' writing, that the

shapes he fractures the world into are so unlike those we're familiar with that

any remaking of the world, at least of the world we're used to seeing, is im-

possible. To a certain extent this is true: we can't, from Barthes' language, re- make our world. But we can remake a world, especially if we can sort out the

qualities of Barthes' writing that are significantly de-structive (and constructive) from those that are merely irritating.

Under the category of "merely irritating" I'd include much of his use of un- familiar words and phrases (including neologisms) and much of his unorthodox use of familiar ones. To have to imagine, as we're asked to do in the second quoted passage, "this difference which indefinitely returns" (not the difference between x and y, just difference) isn't easy; and when we're exhorted at the beginning of the book to "posit the image of a triumphant plural" (p. 5), it's hard to know just what we're to do. Also irritating, I think, is the way Barthes distinguishes, as he

frequently does, between "univocal texts" and "multivalent texts," or between the "classic text" and the "modern text": what's irritating is that we know that these distinctions are important to him and yet we have a hard time knowing exactly what he has in mind by them, since he neither gives examples of these kinds of texts nor even indicates if the categories refer to actual books or to abstractions. The distinction he makes between the "readerly" (lisible) and the "writerly"

7Paris: Seuil, 1966, p. 76.

Deciphering S/Z 135

(scriptible) presents all these problems: the terms are neologisms, and though Barthes puts great energy into defining them, it's never completely clear (to me, anyway) whether they refer to historically distinct writings or to attitudes toward writing; whether, that is, the categories are absolutely distinct or whether the writerly becomes readerly in time.

These are cases where Barthes does less than he could, I think, to help us through his language--the cases that make it hard to defend him from a charge of arrogance (not that he'd mind such a charge). In other cases, though, our difficulty is caused by our own ignorance. Most of us aren't familiar with the vocabulary of classical rhetoric, and this is a vocabulary that Barthes enjoys using, because it provides a classification of the world according to forms of language. Even more of a problem, because it's more prevalent in the book, is the vocabu- lary of Saussurian linguistics, especially the signifier/signified distinction. I don't think it's possible to read S/Z without first becoming familiar with these terms, a condition which makes Saussure's Course in General Linguistics and maybe also Barthes' Elements of Semiology and Mythologies pre-requisites for S/Z.8 S/Z, that is, is (among other things) a semiological study: it follows, in Barthes' work, his development of a semiological vocabulary in his studies of popular culture in general (Mythologies) and of fashion magazines in particular (Systeme de La Mode). His application of this vocabulary to a literary text in S/Z is an important step in the development of semiology because it dramatizes, as the use of only traditional literary-critical vocabularies wouldn't, that a literary work is a cultural artifact like any other, that it creates its meanings in much the same way that everyday speech or a wrestling match or a TV commercial do, and that we can understand what makes it different, what makes it "literature," only if we under- stand first how it is like so much else of what we do, read, see.

The unfamiliar vocabularies help make S/Z difficult, because they add an ele- ment that we're not used to; but what makes S/Z more than difficult, what makes it unnerving for an American reader, is, I think, what's taken away. The human subject, the individual person as an active agent, is almost completely absent from Barthes' sentences. What act in his sentences, what function as their most fre- quent grammatical subjects, are verb forms (especially infinitives: to read, to find, to take, to study in the quoted passages) and nouns that indicate kinds of language (discourse, code, text).9 When a personal pronoun appears (as in exam- ples #1 and #4) it quickly gives way to other subjects and it never gets the energy of Barthes' metaphors.

The implications of this syntax are, for the world of literary criticism as we know it, shattering. The subject in our own critical sentences is overwhelmingly, and usually unquestioningly, human and individual. "The author," "the narrator," a "character," "the reader" are our habitual grammatical subjects and, on another

8For more on the place of Saussurian vocabulary in structuralism, see "Structuralism for The Non-Specialist" by Dorothy Selz, pp. 160-166 in this issue; and also Jonathan Culler, Struc- turalist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975).

9Thanks to Richard Miller's extraordinarily careful translation, we can read the English version of S/Z in confidence that we're getting Barthes' own syntax and the import of his diction.

136 COLLEGE ENGLISH

level, the subjects of our articles and books. (The main organizing principle of MLA Abstracts is the Author-as-Subject.) And our literature itself (American literature) is a literature of the individual: the characteristic theme of our novels is the individual in struggle against the rest of the world (however that world

gets defined). It's no accident that Mailer is our richest "serious" writer. All of this is just to say that we're still living, in American criticism and American culture in general, in a Romantic world. Structuralism is a direct threat to this world, because the world that it forms, in its sentences and in its books, has

very little room for the individual. He's definitely not at the center, as he is of the Romantic world. If he's there at all, his appearance is brief and impotent: he

passes through systems of thought that pre-exist him, he fills slots designed by these systems, at the most he "performs"-but he doesn't "create."

And yet this world is far from uncreative and uncreating. To a Romantic ear a world without the individual might sound dead; but the structuralist world is busy, active, energetic. In Foucault (a label, the structuralists would say, not for a man or his work but for a particular manifestation of the structuralist

vision), "spaces" are always "folding in on themselves"; in Levi-Strauss, elements of myths "transform" themselves. And in Barthes, language is always on the move: in the quoted passages, codes "take over the text" and voices "de-originate the

utterance"; elsewhere in S/Z, "semes can migrate," "the utterance shifts," "the discourse returns," "the codes meet." Not only is the world of S/Z active; it's violent. "The cultural proverb vexes, provokes an intolerant reading; the Balzacian text is clotted with it: because of its cultural codes, it stales, rots, excludes itself from writing" (p. 98; italics mine). Language, Barthes insists, matters. It is a force (even, he'd say, the force) in the world, and if we don't see this, we allow ourselves to be helpless victims of it. In the Balzac story, Sarrasine dies because,

according to Barthes, he mistakes one code for another: a defect in discourse "kills him" (p. 184). Since to write, to use language, is "to fracture the world" and "to remake it," we'd better know how things are being cut up and put together around us, before us, and in us.

The penalty for not knowing, in the reading of books and the writing about

them, isn't death; it's misunderstanding. A pretty big penalty, though, if the

purpose of our criticism is to understand-to understand how literature is made, how it works, what it's for. Barthes tells us, implicitly in his grammar and

explicitly in digression after digression (and in other essays, like Critique et

Ve'rit6 and the "History and Literature" section of On Racine'o) that we have

misunderstood, that our critical vocabulary fractures literature into shapes that

keep us from seeing literature's connections to the rest of our life. Most distorting is our taking the codes of realism for truth. For example, the shape that we call

"character." In our critical language, the literary character is one of the basic

units of fiction and is given a status and function comparable to those held by people in real life. Even sophisticated critics who know that realistic fiction is

only one kind of fiction still fall into its vocabulary when they try to describe it. Booth, for instance, talks about "characters as people" and about an author

10New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.

Deciphering S/Z 137

who "knows all this and more about his characters";" Roger Sale talks about an author's relation to his characters as "determination to see these lives through" and praises a book which "takes them [its characters] as they are" 12-as if they are anything but words on a page, as if they had the "lives" that realism pretends they have. Narrators, too, are given independent lives: when Booth refers to "narrators who unconsciously betray themselves" (p. 305), he's giving to narrators an unconscious (something, according to Freudian psychology, that's non-verbal

by definition). Booth isn't alone in this, of course (his acceptance of the

vocabulary of realism is especially instructive, though, since he has so rigorously exposed so many other assumptions of our critical language): all of our terms for narrators come from the vocabulary of human psychology. We talk about narrators who are coy or self-conscious or unreliable, who have "serious faults" or "redeeming qualities"; and we'd say, with Booth, that "few modern narrators are made up entirely of qualities at either extreme" (p. 300).

But to this statement, Barthes would say no: narrators aren't made up of

qualities at all; they're made up of language. Not that he's the first to say this. We've been saying it for a long time in some of our own criticism, but without

admitting its implications: without giving up the vocabulary of humanism. Barthes

gives it up (ruthlessly, some may think) and exposes as a sentimentality our

clinging to it; he insists that if we see that a book is made from language, we draw all the implications of this vision. This means breaking down what we'd

accepted as the inviolable units of the individual into their component parts: units of language. A character is an imaginary space, a converging place for semes ("when identical semes traverse the same proper name several times and appear to settle upon it, a character is created," p. 67). What we call the narrator is, as we saw in the discussion of Cultural Codes, a mingling of voices. The author, "that somewhat decrepit deity of the old criticism" (p. 211), is almost completely banished from Barthes' prose: "Balzac" makes only about a dozen appearances in S/Z, and usually in the form of an adjective (the Balzacian text). And the reader, who for Booth is a person being addressed by another person (the author or implied author), and for Stanley Fish is an actively responding (even if hypothetical) individual, is for Barthes a voice in the text: "writing is active, for it acts for the reader: it proceeds not from an author but from a public scribe, a notary institutionally responsible not for flattering his client's tastes but rather for registering at his dictation the summary of his interests. . ." (p. 152; italics Barthes'). XWriting is active: the discourse, which in our criticism is the medium through which an author speaks to his readers, is not a medium for Barthes but the very stuff of writing: "the discourse, and not one or another of its characters, is the only positive hero of the story" (p. 145).

What Barthes is doing, to borrow Thomas Kuhn's language, is offering a new

paradigm for literary criticism, a set of terms that divides the area of investigation differently than the current paradigm does. Much of the energy of S/Z goes into explicitly drawing (yanking) the implications of this new paradigm: Barthes

11The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 129 & p. 109. 12New York Review of Books, April 3, 1975.

138 COLLEGE ENGLISH

seems at one time or another to deal with (both in the gangster's and the

disciplinarian's senses: getting rid of, taking to task) almost all the categories of

literary criticism, from local matters like the nature of the blazon or the workings of euphemism to larger concerns like (as I've mentioned) definitions of plot, of meaning, of realism. Each reader will find different of his dealings stimulating or devastating or challenging or maddening (I don't see how any less active

responses, like boredom or mere satisfaction, are possible) and will single out different ones as the most significant. My own choice, at this time in our critical

history anyway, would be his treatment of realism as a system of conventions instead of, as it is seen by almost all American critics (Susan Sontag and William Gass being two of the exceptions), as the form of the natural.

I can't discuss here all of the implications of Barthes' exposition of realism- because I'm sure I don't see them all (people will be discovering them for years, as happens in response to any new paradigm) and because I don't have space to discuss even those that are apparent to me. I do want to focus briefly, though, on one that strikes me as especially important, because it has to do with the

way literature gets connected to the rest of life. According to the vocabulary of realism, literary works are, as we all know, "reflections of reality." One

implication of this metaphor is that language has no place in it: somehow, realism tells us, language connects reality and literature (language "transposes" reality, or "conveys" it), but reality is always something solid, existing outside the language of books and before it. Reality, experience, comes first; literature is "derived from it"; and the nature of the derivation is left vague. A speculation like Booth's that "some pattern derived from our experience is probably imitated

by every successful [literary] convention" (p. 127) seems to be the best we can do as long as we insist on seeing experience, life, as one (first) thing and literature as another, with a relation of "derivation" between them. Barthes shows us a way out of this haziness by seeing a different sort of patterning at work. Experience, he says, is patterned in the same way as literature; language runs through all of human activity; all of life, not just that part we call literature, is ordered by language.

To say that language runs through all of human life, to speak, as structuralism

does, of the "linguistic nature of the world" (p. 154), is both obvious and scandalous. Obvious because Western thought has been saying for a long time that what defines human life as human is its capacity for speech; scandalous because to accept the "linguistic nature of the world" we seem to have to reject our notion of human nature, and to accept instead the dissolution of the individual as a separate entity. Barthes and most of the other structuralists seem to delight in the vision of this dissolution: they're not at all gloomy about the dissolution

of the self, about an end to what Lrvi-Strauss calls an "indulgent attitude towards the illusions of subjectivity."13 Their own indulgence is toward language itself; the extravagence of Foucault's metaphors when he talks about language is typical (as is the position of man in those metaphors):

How can [man] be the subject of a language that for thousands of years has been

13Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1961), p. 62.

Deciphering S/Z 139

formed without him, a language whose organization escapes him, whose meaning sleeps an almost invincible sleep in the words he momentarily activates by means of discourse, and within which he is obliged, from the very outset, to lodge his speech and thought, as though they were doing no more than animate, for a brief period, one segment of that web of innumerable possibilities? (The Order of Things, Vintage edition, p. 323)

The web's possibilities may be "innumerable," but that doesn't stop the struct- uralists from trying to discover how this innumerability functions. The main

question of our time, Foucault says, is "What is language, how can we find a way round it in order to make it appear in itself, in all its plenitude?" (p. 306). The structuralists are willing (eager) to follow all the implications of this question -including the implication that language, "in all its plenitude," is all there is to ask about. If language is what runs through all of human life and what makes

possible the creation of meaning, then language, they insist, doesn't point to

something outside it which gives it meaning but points only to other language. And we can never stop this pointing and say there, we have it. Codes always slide into other codes, and our traditional resting places (experience, the self) participate in this sliding: experience is made up of the codes of everyday life; the self (subjectivity) is a crossing, within the space of one person, of certain codes.

IV

Such visions of infinite regress delight the structuralists, put them in awe of the energy and inventiveness of the thought-producing system which is the human mind. But to many of us, visions of infinite regress are frightening. No wonder we stop the infinite play of the codes with a belief in a solid core of

something: the individual, reality, experience. We need something to hold on to, so we naturally ("naturally," the structuralists would write: they always put quotes around "natural," to indicate that what we call natural is only the system of codes we take for granted, the one that we refuse to see as a system of codes, a product of culture)--we "naturally" cling to the solidities that Romanticism offers us, especially in the face of this foreign invader.

But structuralism isn't all that foreign. Its most vigorous champions today are French (maybe because the French have a tradition of enjoying the play of the mind for its own sake, and for structuralism the play of the mind defines the activity of the world: one of Barthes' favorite terms is jeu) but it has sources and parallels in many disciplines of Anglo-American thought. The French structuralists all point to Charles Peirce as one of the first proposers of semiology; and they take their cybernetic vocabulary from Norbert Weiner and one of their linguistic models from Chomsky. Chomsky's own work is usually included in bibliographies of structuralism, and Benjamin Lee Whorf's should be, since his hypothesis of "linguistic determinism" (the idea that a culture's language determines its perception of reality, so that there is no absolute reality but only alternative views of it) is a working hypothesis of structuralist anthropology. It's also the assumption behind Thomas Kuhn's notion of the

140 COLLEGE ENGLISH

paradigm, which I borrowed earlier: a paradigm is a structure 'of thought within which individual members of a scientific community operate and whose terms determine the nature of their research. The individual, according to this notion, only plays a role set up by the paradigm. And the importance of the individual is reduced still further in recent books by Lewis Thomas (a biologist and

physician) and Gregory Bateson (a psychologist and ecologist),14 who both insist that our conception of ourselves as separate individuals is a misconception. Both argue-Thomas with wry amusement, Bateson with apocalyptic urgency- against what Thomas calls "our human chauvinism"; and both base their argument on the metaphor of a communications network comprising the whole world

(of matter and of thought), within which each ("each") of us is a non-isolable link. The metaphor of a communication system is also the one that Frye used in first defining archetypal criticism, which was to study "poems as units of

poetry as a whole and symbols as units of communication";5i and much more of what Frye says in the Anatomy could certainly be called structuralist. Todorov, in fact, begins his study of The Fantastic by accepting as his "point of departure" what he sees as the major postulates of Frye's theory, which include (as Todorov lists them): that literary criticism should be as rigorous as science (a demand familiar to us, since Richards at least); that literature, both the individual work and literature in general, is a system, referring not to the world outside but to

itself; that all art is equally conventional, and self-expression in literature is an

illusion.16 Barthes would accept these postulates as well, but there are other assumptions

of Frye's (like the belief in content, in something "contained" in the words of literature) that neither he nor Todorov would accept, and still others (like the separation of the act of criticism from the act of reading) that Todorov would accept but Barthes (along with Fish) wouldn't. In other words, neither structuralism nor American criticism is the solid block of thought that I've been

pretending it to be so far. This pretense has been useful (and I defend it) for

bringing into view certain basic differences between structuralism and American criticism in general. But of course in practice nothing is "in general," and we could take another view of this whole matter and look at where particular lines of structuralist thought diverge and where some of these lines cross over and

overlap with some of the many divergent lines of American criticism. Anyone

reading this essay has probably been doing something like this already: making mental marginations, for each aspect of Barthes' thought that I've pointed to, about one of his favorite critics (or himself) who "says the same thing." Whole articles could be written (and will be: the lines are there, they have only to be

followed) tracing the similarities between, for instance, Todorov and Frye, or Barthes and Frye or Fish or Booth or Richards. . . I can't write them all here. Instead, I'll continue along the lines I've been following: the lines that

show structuralism and American criticism as basically different systems of

14Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell (New York: Viking, 1974); Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco, etc.: Chandler, 1972).

1sAnatomy of Criticism (Atheneum edition), p. 104. 16Ohio: Case Western Reserve Press, 1973.

Deciphering S/Z 141

thought which, though they sometimes "say the same thing," have their centers of interest in different places. In choosing this course, I've wanted to point along the way to some of the things that structuralism can show us that are covered over by our own habits of thought. I've wanted, that is, to point to what structuralism, with its focus on language as the stuff of life, can teach us which our usual criticism, with its focus on the individual as the stuff of life, cannot. But I don't think, as some of my bandwagon rhetoric may have implied, that structuralism can teach us everything, and so after a few more pedagogical gestures, toward structuralism's value for our professional lives, I'll close by acknowledging some of what structuralism's own system of thought seems to leave out.

V

One of our major professional activities is writing, yet we rarely insist (though Richards long ago asked us to) on making the activity of writing part of our own subject of investigation. As long as the writing is Shakespeare's or Faulkner's, we go along with the claim that to write is to fracture the world and to remake it; but when the writing is our own, we balk. Sometimes we balk out of ignorance (just not seeing how we're cutting things up), sometimes out of fear (the horror, which we pass on to our students, of "getting off the subject"). But often it's out of exhaustion: always watching what our language is doing as we write takes

extraordinary mental activity; it requires a sort of constant double vision, one

eye on our subject, the other on what we're subjecting it to (our own language). And it's hard to know, even if we have the energy for sustained feats of double vision, just how to perform them: how can we include our subjecting in our subject? how can we get language to question itself?

Structuralism has set itself the task of directly confronting these questions. In a sense it had to set itself this task: since it sees language as running through all of life and ordering it according to patterns that refer always to other patterns but never to something outside, since it refuses to grant us the security of a position outside of language, then to hold its own patterns up as secure and final would be to mock its whole vision. But avoiding this mockery is, as anyone knows who's tried it, easier said than done. The saying is easy: we have the codes of apology to slip into, the voices of "this is just my opinion, I don't present it as the final one." But if we refuse to settle for (or into) such codes, what can we do? The structuralists' answer is contained in Barthes' silent equation of "the world" and "the book" ("to write is in a way to fracture the world (the book) and to remake it"). What this equation implies, and what Barthes makes explicit elsewhere (for example in "The Structuralist Activity") is that the critic, whose object of study is a book, and the cultural analyst, whose object of study is, say, a kinship system, are performing the same operation as the artist, whose object of study is the world. None of these activities is any more or less "creative" than the others, and all bear the same responsibility toward the manner of their creating ("remaking"). This responsibility is, as Barthes phrased it in "Science versus Literature,"'" to make one's own discourse "entirely

142 COLLEGE ENGLISH

homogeneous with its object," no matter what difficulties (of writing and reading) ensue.

And there are bound to be difficulties. For instance, we're accustomed to a linear, one-directional flow of discourse, to essays (like this one) which follow a single thread to its concluding "point" (or, if there are several threads running along, that "tie them together" at the end). But if you see language as the structuralists, learning from modern linguistics, do, not as a single thread

moving in one direction but as a network extending in all directions from

any one point, then making your own language exclusively linear is denying this vision. Barthes' unusual structuring of S/Z is an attempt to keep from denying this vision, an attempt to shape his book according to the same metaphors that the book's own language proposes. The structure of the book tells us, by its

arbitrary cutting of Sarrasine and its almost random placing of the digressions, that every fragment of language, every line, is a part of a larger network: that from any point in the Balzac story, codes can be seen to run through, and from

any point in the story or in the inventory of the codes, a digression can take off. And can move, it seems, in any number of directions (there is no "typical" digression). Our notion of a "digression" is of course being re-defined (and re-valued) here: a digression for Barthes is not a side track off the main path, since there is no main path; there are only paths, all equally "side" or "main," since all will lead eventually, if we follow them long enough, into each other. But even this structuring of the material into lines of thought that weave through each other isn't allowed to remain as the final one. Barthes offers us, after the last digression, two alternative orderings of the book's materials: a list of the terms of the Code of Actions (implying that a list of any of the other Codes' terms would be equally possible) and an outline of the material of the digressions according to some of their frequently recurring terms (implying that an outline

according to other of their terms would be equally possible). With each of these alternative orderings, the entire book shifts its form for us, becomes a new

object: what the book (the world) means depends on which shape we are at that moment seeing it take.

This is to say that Barthes makes his book act as he sees the world act, and

other structuralists do the same. Levi-Strauss explains that he's structured The

Raw and The Cooked "to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythological thought" so that his book on myths will be "itself a kind of myth."'" Or Derrida,

writing about the necessarily metaphorical language of philosophical discourse, works at trying himself to speak from within metaphor.19 In making their books act out their vision of the world, the structuralists provide us, I think, with

models of integrity. But when I say this, I hope it's clear that I don't mean

"models" in the sense of patterns for us to follow, handy forms that we can

impose on our own materials. If we start sprinkling our books with stars and

throwing in REFs and SEMls at every chance, we're no better than Epaminondas.

17TLS, Sept. 28, 1967; rpt. in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York:

Basic Books, 1970). 18New York: Harper & Row, 1969, p. 6. 19"White Mythology," NLH, Autumn 1974.

Deciphering S/Z 143

By "models of integrity," I mean that the structuralists follow rigorously, honestly, the implications of their vision of the world, and also that that vision itself is a vision of integral-ness and one which can be of special value for us. We set ourselves up as the profession that deals with language, but we rarely make language itself the subject of what we write or what we teach. Instead, we isolate a few particular uses of language (literature, freshman composition, creative writing, literary criticism) and treat them as separate objects, without even asking what defines them as separate, what distinguishes them from all the other forms of language, or why these particular forms are more deserving of our attention than, say, the language that bombards us and our students every day on the public media or the language with which we shape our private lives. We've gotten ourselves in the strange professional position of calling ourselves English teachers and yet ignoring most of what goes on in English. I'm certainly not the first to be calling attention to this position,20 and I don't mean to suggest that a crash course in structuralism can automatically get us out of it. But I do think that structuralism can help us make a sense of our professional lives that we don't often now make. At the very least it can show us how to connect our various activities, by insisting that the question vwhat is language? runs through every question we ask of any use of language. Beyond this, structuralism's vision of the linguistic nature of the world can encourage us to think about why we teach our students about so little of that world: why, for example, undergraduates should know more about what whiteness means in Moby Dick than about how whiteness (or anything else) gets to "mean" at all, or why they should be able to analyze Donne's double meanings more thoroughly than Kissinger's.

There is another sort of model that American critics are finding in structuralism, and I should mention it not only to be fair to readers whose priorities are different from my own, but also to indicate the variety of responses that a book like S/Z makes possible. For Robert Scholes (in Structuralism and Literature), structuralism's greatest value is in the methods of literary analysis that it is developing. "What we need in criticism," he feels, "are limits, guidelines, ways of focusing our work so that we avoid duplication and enlarge our knowledge of the whole system" (p. 167). The structuralists who most excite Scholes are therefore people like Todorov and Greimas, who are working to develop systems that can be applied to a variety of literary texts--say, to a whole genre. So Scholes is understandably a bit uncomfortable with S/Z. Its system of codes (for Scholes the center of the book) "is not systematic enough to be applied easily by other analysts to other texts" (p. 155); and though he appreciates the brilliance and fun of the digressions, he's unsure about their "use." But for me, as must be clear by now, S/Z's "use" lies less in its codifying system (though, as I've indicated, I see certain definite values in its refining of our literary method) than in its display of a mind that is always moving outside of systems, both its own and others that we habitually carry with us in our reading, writing,

20Richard Ohmann, in "English Departments and the Professional Ethos" (NLH, Spring 1974), gives a much more thorough analysis of our professional position; and the Committee on Public Doublespeak of the NCTE has been energetically trying to shift it.

144 COLLEGE ENGLISH

experiencing. The differing responses that Scholes and I have to the book interests me because the differences seem to be a matter of temperament (some people are more comfortable in systems, others out of them); and the fact that readers of such different temperaments can be enthusiastic about S/Z is a tribute, I think, to Barthes' genius.

But to call S/Z a work of genius is to plunge, with what looks like an inescap- able irony, into one of those areas that structuralism itself seems not to recognize. When the grid of language with which we cover the world shifts so that the self

goes out of focus or disappears altogether, then concepts of individual achievement

disappear too. And so do concepts of individual responsibility. One of the boldest, and for me most disturbing, passages in S/Z is where Barthes makes this explicit. In praising Flaubert he says:

... he does not stop the play of codes (or stops it only partially), so that (and this is indubitably the proof of writing) one never knows if he is responsible for what he writes (if there is a subject behind his language); for the very being of writing (the meaning of the labor that constitutes it) is to keep the question Who is speaking? from ever being answered. (p. 140; italics Barthes')

This is hard to take, especially after Watergate has dramatized for us some of the political consequences of language with no speaker behind it; and yet we have to take it if we take structuralism all the way. We also have to take a critical vocabulary that won't help us determine the value of different works of art: if any text is a cutting from the network of language, if all art is conven-

tion, what makes one text "better" (a term not in structuralist vocabulary) than another? Barthes does imply that the more plurality there is-the more a text dramatizes the plural nature of language, and the less it stops the play of the codes-the better. But plurality is hard to measure in practice, especially if all codes refer to all others: how can we measure infinite regress?

These are big areas that structuralism leaves aside, but I don't think that we should therefore leave it aside, that because structuralism doesn't address itself to all of our concerns then we shouldn't concern ourselves with it. I don't see how we can close our eyes to what structuralism shows us about the linguistic nature of the world; but I don't see, either, exactly how much we can open ourselves to at one time. I'm unsure, that is, whether we can somehow put together the two structures of thought that romanticism and structuralism

embody, or whether they are mutually exclusive structures, existing simultane-

ously in the world but able to exist only successively in each mind. Metaphors like Richard Poirier's "performing self" (the individual struggling with the forms of language) or Barthes' own jeu (the play of the mind through its

systems) encourage me to think that some simultaneous vision might be possible, if we work at it and aren't afraid, meanwhile, to risk losing our usual sense of self. If a combination of the visions of structuralism and romanticism is impossible, then my own attempt in this essay to straddle their two languages-to speak from the position of a personal "I" while at the same time enthusistically adopting metaphors of grids, tracings, lines-is naive or misguided or futile (depending on one's attitude toward impossibility). Which doesn't mean that it isn't also worth

trying.