S/Z

"'Life' then, in the classic text, becomes a nauseating mixture of common opinions, a smothering layer of received ideas: in fact, it is in these cultural codes that what is outmoded in Balzac, the essence of what, in Balzac, cannot be (re)written, is concentrated. What is outmoded, of course, is not a defect in performance, a personal inability of the author to afford opportunities in his work for what will be modern, but rather a fatal condition of Replete Literature, mortally stalked by the army of stereotypes it contains. Thus, a critique of the references (the cultural code) has never been tenable except through trickery, on the very limits of Replete Literature, where it is possible (but at the cost of what acrobatics and with what uncertainty) to criticize the stereotype (to vomit it up) without recourse to a new stereotype: that or irony." [206]


"As though terror-struck: who is speaking here? It cannot be Sarrasine, even indirectly, since he interprets La Zambinella's fear as timidity. Above all, it cannot be the narrator, because he knows that La Zambinella really is terrified. The modalization (as though) expresses the interests of only one character , who is neither Sarrasine nor the narrator, but the reader: it is the reader who is concerned that the truth be simultaneously named and evaded, an ambiguity which the discourse nicely creates by as thought, which indicates the truth and yet reduces it declaratively to a mere appearance. What we hear, therefore, is the displaced voice which the reader lends, by proxy, to the discourse: the discourse is speaking according to the reader's interests. Whereby we see that writing is not the communication of a message which starts from the author and proceeds to the reader; it is specifically the voice of reading itself: in the text, only the reader speaks." [151]


"Yet this noise, this uncertainty are emitted by the discourse with a view toward a communication: they are given to the reader so that he may feed on them: what the reader reads is a countercommunication; and if we grant that the double understanding far exceeds the limited case of the play on words or the equivocation and permeates, in various forms and densities, all classic writing (by very reason of its polysemic vocation), we see that literatures are in fact arts of "noise"; what the reader consumes is this defect in communication, this deficient message; what the whole structuration effects for him and offers him as the most precious nourishment is a countercommunication; the reader is an accomplice, not of this or that character, but of the discourse itself insofar as it plays on the division of reception, the impurity of communication: the discourse, and not one of another of its characters, if the only positive hero of the story." [145]


"It follows that the meaning of a text lies not in this or that interpretation but in the diagrammatic totality of its readings, in their plural system. Some will say that the scene in the theater "as told by the author" has the privilege of literality and thus constitutes the "truth," the reality of the text; the reading of the orgasm would therefore be a symbolic reading in their eyes, an unwarranted elucubration. "The text and nothing but the text": this proposition has little meaning except intimidation: the literality of the text is a system like any other: the literal in Balzac is, after all, nothing but the "transcription" of another literality, that of the symbol: euphemism is a language. In fact, the meaning of a text can be nothing but the plurality of its systems, its infinite (circular) "tanscribability": one system transcribes another, but reciprocally as well: with regard to the text, there is no "primary," "natural," "national," "mother" critical language: from the outset, as it is created, the text is multilingual; there is no entrance language or exit language for the textual dictionary, since it is not the dictionary's (closed) definitional power that the text possesses, but its infinite structure." [120]


"To depart / to travel / to arrive / to stay: the journey is saturated. To end, to fill, to join, to unify -- one might say that this is the basic requirement of the readerly, as though it were prey to some obsessive fear: that of omitting a connection. Fear of forgetting engenders the appearance of a logic of actions; terms and the linkns between them are posited (invented) in such a way that they unite, duplicate each other, create an illusion of continuity. The plenum generates the drawing intended to "express" it, and the drawing evokes the complement, coloring: as if the readerly abhors a vacuum. What would be the narrative of a journey in which it was said that one stays somewhere without having arrived, that one travels without having departed -- in which it was never said, having departed, one arrives of fails to arrive? Such a narrative would be a scandal, the extenuation, by hemorrhage, of readerliness." [105]


"Sculpture is said to struggle with matter, not with representation, as in the case of painting; it is a demiurgic art, an art which extracts rather than covers, an art of the hand that takes hold." [99]


"All subversion, or all novelistic submission, thus beings with the Proper Name: specific -- as well specified -- as is the Proustian narrator's social position, his perilously maintained lack of a name creates a serious deflation of the realistic illusion: the Proustian I is not of itself a name (in contrast to the substantive character of the novelistic pronoun, XXVIII); because it is undermined, trbouled by the disturbances of age, it loses its biographical tense by a certain blurring. What is obsolescent in today's novel is not the novelistic, it is the character; what can no longer be written is the Proper Name." [95]


"Thus begins a process of nomination which is the essence of the reader's activity: to read is to struggle to name, to subject the sentences of the text to a semantic transformation. This transformation is erratic; it consists in hesitating among several names: if we are told that Sarrasine had "one of those strong wills that know no obstacle," what are we to read? will, energy, obstinancy, stubbornness, etc.? The connotator refers not so much to a name as to a synonymic complex whose common nucleus we sense even while the discourse is leading us toward other possibilities, toward other related signifieds: thus, reading is absorbed in a kind of metonymic skid, each synonym adding to its neighbor some new trait, some new departure ..." [92]


"The game here is grammatical in essence (and therefore much more exemplary): it consists in presenting, acrobatically, for as long as possible, the plural diversity of possibilities within a singular sytagm, to "transform" the verbal proposition behind each cause ("because he was hard of hearing") into a double substantive ("hardness of hearing"); in short, to produce a constant model carried out to infinity, which is to constrain language as one wishes: whence the very pleasure of power." [58 - 59]


"State by the discourse itself, the ironic code is, in principle, an explicit quotation of what someone has said; however, irony acts as a signpost, and thereby it destroys the multivalence we might expect from quoted discourse. A multivalent text can carry out its basic duplicity only if it subverts the opposition between true and false, if it fails to attribute quotations (even when seeking to discredit them) to explicit authorities, if it flouts all respect for irign, paternity, propriety, if it destroys the voice which could give the text its ("organic") unity, in short, if it coldy and fraudulently abolishes quotation marks which must, as we say, in all honesty enclose a quotation and juridically distribute the ownership of the sentences to their respective proprietors, like subdivisions of a field. For multivalence (contradicted by irony) is a transgression of ownership." [44 - 45]


"In modern texts, the voices are so treated that any reference is impossible: the discourse, or better, the language, speaks: nothing more. By contrast, in the classic text the majority of the utterances are assigned an origin, we can identify their parentage, who is speaking: either a consciousness (of a character, of the author) or a culture (the anonymous is still an origin, a voice: the voice we find, for example, in the gnomic code); however, it may happen that in the classic text, always haunted by the appropriation of speech, the voice gets lost, as though it had leaked out through a hole in the discourse." [41]

"The five codes mentioned, frequently heard simultaneously, in fact endow the text with a kind of plural quality (the text is actually polyphonic), but of the five codes, only three establish permutable, reversible connections, outside the constraint of time (the semic, cultural, and symbolic codes); the other two impose their terms according to an irreversible order (the hermeneutic and proairetic codes). The classic text, therefore, is actually tabular (and not linear), but its tabularity is vectorized, it follows a logico-temporal order. It is a multivalent but incompletely reversible system. What blocks its reversibility is just what limits the plural nature of the classic text. These blocks have names: on the one hand, truth; on the other, empiricism: against -- or between -- them, the modern text comes into being." [30]

"... the readerly text is a tonal text (for which habit creates a reading process just as conditioned as our hearing: one might say there is a reading eye as there is a tonal ear, so that to unlearn the readerly would be the same as to unlearn the tonal), and its tonal unity is basically dependent on two sequential codes: the revelation of truth and the coordination of the actions represented: there is the same constraint in the gradual order of melody and in the equally gradual order of the narrative sequence. Now, it is precisely this constraint which reduces the plural of the classic text." [30]

"The five codes create a kind of network, a topos through which the entire text passes (or rather, in passing, becomes text). Thus, if we make no effort to structure each code, or the five codes among themselves, we do so deliberately, in order to assume the multivalence of the text, its partial reversibility. We are, in fact, concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structuration. 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 obliterated network -- all the movements and inflections of a "dissolve," which permits both overlapping and loss of messages." [20]


"Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us 'throw away' the story once it has been consumed ('devoured'), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, and professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere), multiplies it in its variety and its plurality: rereading draws the text out of its internal chronology ('this happens before of after that') and recaptures a mythic time (without before or after); it contests the claim which would have us believe that the first reading is a primary, naïve, phenomenal reading which we will only , afterwards, have to 'explicate', to intellectualize (as if there were a beginning of reading, as if everything were not already read: there is no first reading, even if the text is concerned to give us that illusion by several operations of suspense, artifices more spectacular than persuasive); rereading is no longer consumption, but play (that play which is the return of the different)." [15 - 16]


"... but the step-by-step commentary is of necessity a renewal of the entrances to the text, it avoids structuring the text excessively, avoids giving it that additional structure which would come from a dissertation and would close it: it stars the text, instead of assembling it." [13]


"If we want to remain attentive to the plural of a text (however limited it may be), we must renounce structuring this text in large masses, as was done by classical rhetoric and by secondary-school explication: no construction of the text: everything signifies ceaselessly and several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure. Whence the idea, and so to speak the necessity, of a gradual analysis of a single text." [11 - 12]


"Reading involves risks of objectivity or subjectivity (both are imaginary) only insofar as we define the text as an expressive object (presented for our own expression), sublimated under a morality of truth, in one instance laxist; in the other, ascetic. Yet reading is not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing which we endow with all the glamour of creation and anteriority. It is a form of work (which is why it would be better to speak of a lexeological act -- even a lexeographical act, since I write my reading), and the method of this work is topological: I am not hidden within the text, I am simply irrecoverable from it: my task is to move, to shift systems whose perspective ends neither at the text nor at the 'I': in operational terms, the meanings I find are established not by 'me' or by others, but by their sytematic mark: there is not other proof of a reading than the quality and endurance of its systematics; in other words: than its functioning. To read, in fact, is a labor of language. 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, reassemble, and their grouping call for further naming: I name, I unname, I rename: so the text passes: it is a nomination in the course of becoming, a tireless approximation, a metonymic labor." [10 - 11]


S/Z
Roland Barthes