Richard L. W.

Clarke LITS3304 Notes 10D

RO LAND BARTHES TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF A TALE BY EDGAR ALLAN PO E (1973) Barthes, Roland. "Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Allan Poe." The Sem iotic Challenge. Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 261-293. Here, Barthes perform s a textual analysis of The Facts of the Case of M. Valdem ar by Edgar Allan Poe utilising a technique which he develops at greater length with reference to Sarrasine by Balzac in his S / Z. The basic question which he ponders in this essay is the following: if literary texts do not express the authors original ideas nor refer to reality, how exactly do texts produce m eaning? The answer is: just as signs signify by virtue of their relationship of diffrance to other signs, so too do texts signify by virtue of their intertextual relations with other texts. All texts are caught up, like signs, in an incalculably enorm ous system of texts (analogous to the signifying system ) which is also predicated upon diffrance. Like the sign, no text is an island unto itself, each text depending upon the other texts if it is to have m eaning. His goal in painstakingly segm enting this short story is to dem onstrate the com plex intertextual process by which we all read without realising it. There are, Barthes argues, two m ajor tendencies (261) in the application of semiology, or the science of significations (261) to the study of literature. Firstly, analysis, confronting all the worlds narratives, attempts to establish a narrative m odel, obviously a form al one, a structure or gramm ar of Narrative, from which (once elaborated) each particular narrative will be analysed in term s of its departures (261). Secondly, the narrative is im m ediately subsum ed . . . within the notion of Text, space, process of significations under way, in a word signifying process ( signifiance : a word to which we shall return) . . . which is observed not as a finite, closedoff product, but as a production in the process of being m ade, grafted onto other texts, other codes (it is the intertextual), articulated thus in term s of society, of History, not according to determ inist paths, but to citational ones. (261-262) He calls the second approach textual analysis (262) to distinguish it from the structural analysis (172) of narratologists, claim ing that while the latter is norm ally devoted to oral narrative (m yth) (262) (he has in m ind Lvi-Strauss The Structural Study of Myth), the former is applied to written narrative (262). Textual analysis does not attem pt to describe the structure of a work; it is not a m atter of recording a structure, but rather of producing a m obile structuration of the text (a structuration which shifts from reader to reader down through History), of staying within the signifying volum e of the work, within its signifying process . Textual analysis does not seek to know by what the text is determ ined (collected as the final term of a causality), but rather how the text explodes and scatters. (262) The reason for this is that the text is open ad infinitum : no reader, no subject, no science can exhaust the text (262). The goal of textual analysis is to locate and classify without rigour not all the m eanings of the text . . . but the form s, the codes which m ake m eaning possible. We shall locate the avenues of m eaning (262). The purpose is not to find the m eaning, nor even a m eaning of the text, and our work is not related to literary criticism of the herm eneutic type (which attem pts to interpret the text according to the truth it regards as hidden within it), as is for instance Marxist or psychoanalytic criticism (262). The goal is, rather, ultim ately to conceive, to im agine, to experience the plurality of the text, the open-endedness of its signifying process (262). Barthes proposes to follow a certain num ber of operational procedures (262), m ethodological principles (263) being the wrong word insofar as m ethod too frequently postulates a positivistic result (262). These procedures can be reduced to four briefly described accounts (262):

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1.

W e shall segm ent the text . . . into contiguous and generally very short fragm ents (a sentence, a phrase, at m ost a group of three or four sentences) (263) which he term s lexias (263). Lexias are textual signifiers (263). The segmentation of the narrative text into lexias is purely em pirical, dictated by a concern for convenience: the lexia is an arbitrary product, it is sim ply a segm ent within which the distribution of meanings is observed (263). 2. For each lexia, we shall observe the meanings generated by it. By m eaning , we obviously understand not the m eanings of the word or of the group of words which the dictionary and gram m ar, in short the knowledge of our language would account for adequately. We understand, rather, the connotations of the lexia, the secondary m eanings. These connotations m ay be associations . . . .; they m ay be relations , resulting from the juxtaposition of two som etim es quite diverse places in the text (264). Our lexias will be . . . the finest possible sieves, by which we shall skim off the m eanings, the connotations (264). 3. Our analysis will be gradual: we shall proceed step by step through the text. . . . W e shall not construct a m ap of the text, and we shall not be tracing its them atics (264). What we will do, he argues, is unfold the text, the layering of the text (264) (that is, the unfolding of layers of m eanings along the paradigm atic axis), to produce areading . . . film ed in slow-m otion (264) (as the reader proceeds along the syntagm atic axis of the text). 4. W e shall not be unduly concerned if . . . we forget som e m eanings (264). Our aim is not to find the m eaning, nor even a m eaning of the text. . . . Our aim is to m anage to conceive, to im agine, to live the plurality of the text, the opening of its signifying process (173). Our goal is to show departures of m eaning, not arrivals (265) precisely because what founds the text is not an internal, closed, accountable structure, but the outlet of the text onto other texts, other signs, what m akes the text is the intertextual (265), what he term s elsewhere its combinational infinity (265). Because intertextuality is m ore im portant than the Author, Barthes argues, in the analysis we shall not speak of the author, Edgar Poe, nor of the literary history of which he is part (265). After devoting pp. 266 - 288 to the actual textual analysis of the short story, Barthes offers a final section devoted to m ethodological conclusions. We have, he writes, sim ply tried to grasp the narrative as it was being constructed (288). There was no question of producing the structure of Poes tale, still less that of all narratives, but only of returning, in a freer, less attached way, to the gradual unfolding of the text (288). He defines codes as associative fields, a supra-textual organization of notations which im pose a certain notion of structure (288). All codes are essentially cultural: the codes are certain types of already seen, of already read, of already done: the code is the form this already takes, constitutive of the writing of the world (288). He refers to it, accordingly, as the cultural code : this is the code of knowledge, or rather of hum an knowledge, of public opinion, of culture as it is transmitted by the book, by teaching and, m ore generally, by the whole of sociality (288-289). This code has for its reference knowledge as the body of rules elaborated by society (289). There are several subcodes of the general cultural code (289): the scientific code; the rhetorical code, which collects all the social rules of speaking (289); the chronological code (289) (assigning a date, which seem s to us quite natural . . . is in fact a very cultural practice [289]); the socio-historical code (289), that is, all the infused knowledge we have of our tim e, of our society, of our country (289); the code of com m unication (289) (any relation which, in the text, is uttered in the form of address . . . or as exchange [289-290]); the code of actions (290) (what he calls elsewhere the proairetic) which sustains the anecdotal arm ature of the actions, or the utterances which denotes them (290) and which are organised into sequences (290): the

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term s of the actional sequence are linked together am ong them selves . . . by an appearance of logic . . . which proceeds not from the laws of form al reasoning but from our habits of reasoning, of observing: it is an endoxal, cultural logic (it appears logical to us that a severe diagnosis should follow the determination bad health); further, this logic is identified with chronology: what com es after seem s to us caused by . Tem porality and causality . . . seem to us to establish a sort of naturalness , of intelligibility, of anecdotal legibility. . . . (290-291) Last but not least, there is the code of the enigma (291) (the synonym for which is the herm eneutic [291] code) which collects the term s by whose linkage . . . we posit an enigma, and after a few delays which constitute the very spice of the narrative, the solution is disclosed (291). Barthes argues that the codes are m erely deja-lu departures , initiations of intertextuality: the frayed character of the codes is not what contradicts structure . . . but is on the contrary . . . an integral part of structuration . It is this fraying of the text which distinguishes structure object of structural analysis proper from structuration object of the textual analysis we have attempted to perform here (292). In S / Z he m entions at least two other codes: the sem ic (this concerns the connotations often evoked in characterisation or description) and the sym bolic (this concerns the m ain binary oppositions by which hum ans cut up the real such as father versus son, wom an versus m an, life versus death, good versus evil, black versus white, etc.). Barthes argues that the textile m etaphor (292) used here is not accidental: textual analysis needs to represent the text as a tissue (m oreover this is its etym ological m eaning), as a braid of different voices, of m any codes, at once interlaced and incom plete. A narrative is not a tabular space, a plane structure, it is a volum e, a stereophony (292). He insists that m eanings m ode of presence (except perhaps for the actional sequences) is not a development, but an explosion : calls for contact and com m unication, positing of contracts, exchanges, outbursts of references, gleam s of knowledge, dim m er, more penetrating impulses from the other scene (292). These sideway glances are com bined with a forward m om entum : All this volum e is drawn forward (toward the end of the narrative), thereby provoking an im patience of reading, under the effect of two structural arrangem ents: a) distortion : the term s of a sequence or code are separated, braided with heterogeneous elem ents; a sequence seem s to be abandoned . . ., but it is continued later on, som etim es m uch later on; there is the creation of an expectation; we can even, now, define the sequence: that floating m icrostructure which constructs not a logical object but an expectation and its resolution; b) irreversibility : despite the floating character of structuration, in the classical, readerly narrative (such as Poes tale), there are two codes which m aintain a vectorised order, the actional code (based on a logicotem poral order) and the code of the Enigm a (the question is crowned by its solution). (293) Modern avant-garde (293) writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet seek to render the text thoroughly reversible, to expel the logico-temporal residue, to attack em piricism (logic of behaviour, actional code) and truth (code of the Enigm a) (293). Barthes concludes by pointing out that we m ust not exaggerate the distance separating the m odern text from the classical narrative (293) because even in works such as Poes one and the sam e sentence frequently refers to two sim ultaneous codes, without our being able to choose which one is true (293). The characteristic of narrative, once it achieves the quality of a text , is to constrain us to the undecidability of the codes. In whose nam e might we decide? In the authors? But the narrative gives us only a speaker, a

Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 10D

performer who is caught up in his own production. Of this school of criticism , or that? All are challengeable, swept away by history. . . Undecidability is not a weakness, but a structural condition of narration: there is no univocal determ ination of the utterance: in a statement, several codes, several voices are there , without preem inence. Writing is precisely that loss of origin, that loss of m otives to the gain of a volum e of indeterm inations (or of overdeterm inations): this volum e is precisely the signifying process . Writing occurs . . . from the mom ent when we can no longer identify who is speaking and when we can establish only that speaking has begun . Barthess point in all this is that we understand the m eaning of each text by relating it, segment by segment as we read, to bits and pieces of the other texts (texts of all kinds and not just literary texts) which we have internalised and absorbed into our consciousness. Even if we are illiterate and unable to read, we ceaselessly ingest all kinds of oral utterances which then form our consciousness in the sam e way that written texts do. For m ost persons, consciousness is form ed out of a m ixture of oral and written utterances. Barthess argum ent, you m ight recall, is that the Author should not be privileged in literary criticism in the way that he has traditionally been because the so-called Author has little agency and is little m ore than a scriptor, m ore script ed than script ing . Language is not a vehicle or instrum ent which people use: it is, rather, the other way around. Langue speaks or writes itself through people, in the Derridean schem a, the authors hand being cut off from his intention and will. Texts, from this point of view, alm ost write them selves as scriptors m erely regurgitate a zillion texts absorbed consciously or unconsciously.