To Write: an Intransitive Verb?

(1966)
Three years after defining Structuralism as an activity, Barthes became a visiting professor at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore. A fish out of water at this unlikely setting, he was joined by many of his
colleagues at the now famous international symposium, entitled The Languages of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man at the Johns Hopkins Center, between October 18 and the 21 in 1966. On this occasion, he
presented To Write: an Intransitive Verb? In one brief passage, Barthes links writerly and readerly to
the French terms: lisible and scriptible. The readerly ( lisible) text is a classical work: it is the Novel, his old
nemesis. In place of the passive reader, Barthes posited the active reader who reanimated a text through a
performative act of intervention into the text. That said, a glimmer of future problems could be discerned. In
this talk, Barthes mentioned the new union between literature and linguistics or semio-criticism. At this
point, Barthes still believed in what he termed a single unified science of culture.
Interestingly, Barthes referred to Lvi-Strauss by explaining his term homology or the structure of
similarities, but this symposium will also be the occasion where Jacques Derrida decimated the very idea of
the structure. Indeed, this very paper, given by Barthes, sought to place a middle term between reading and
writingthe reader as the writerwhich actually puts great stress on the very structure he is describing. This
symposium was a key moment in literary theory, ushering out Structuralism and introducing Derridas
Deconstruction. But at the time the import of the juxtaposition of Barthes talk and Derridas Structure,
Sign and Play. Indeed, Barthes, without being aware of it was already involved in deconstructive analysis.
For years he had struggled with his penchant for binaries, which, he found, always forced him to insert a
third term. As Barthes related,
To write is traditionally an active verb..to write is becoming a middle verb..in the middle voice of to write,
the distance between script or and language diminishes asymptomatically, such as romantic writings, which
are active, for in them, the agent is not interior but anterior to the process of writing..
As his writings make clear, Derridas attack on Structuralism had an impact on Barthes. The dichotomy
between reading and writing with the middle termnow a familiar device on the part of Bartheswas also
present in his 1973 analysis of S/Z where he began by explaining writing: Our evaluation can be linked
only to a practice, and this practice is that of writing. On the one hand, there is what it is possible to write,
and on the other what it is no longer possible to write: what is within the practice of the writer and what has
left it.. It is here in this book that Barthes establishes yet another binary: the writerly and the readerly. He
continued, What evaluation finds is precisely this value: what can be written (rewritten) today: ..the
writerly. Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make
the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. Returning to an argument he made almost
twenty years ago against classical literature, Barthes pointed out that the reader of the products of the
literary institution which divides the writer from the reader is rendered intransitive when reading is
nothing more than a referendum.Barthes recommended manhandling the text as a way of interpreting
it. The opposite of the writerly text is the readerly text or the classic text.

(1) Subjectivity
Let us assume (temporarily) that an individual can possess interiority, a subjective experience antecedent
to any effort to describe this psychical state via language. Let us assume that Jill is happy. The moment,
though, that Jill writes
, I am happy, she has already failed to convey her emotions qua emotions. Happy is a fixed,
conventional signifier that predates Jills specific experience. Therefore, happy is not an image of Jills or
anyone elses direct state of mind. Technically, people who think that their emotion has some relationship
with the feeling that others describe as happy will avail themselves of the same word. In Jills sentence, the
verb am, too, really strives to arrest the fleeting moment at which Jill wrote. But the instant is gone. Use of
the present tense delivers a sense of continuous yet fleeting in the readers mind, but the verb itself cannot
exactly transcribe the intensity or duration of the feeling. It cannot re-enact the moment. Indeed, Barthes
suggests that the I on the page merely represents a site for a subject-substitute, a character called the
first-person narrator. Once again, conventions of usage can make a character appear to evolve through
time or behave realistically, but the pronoun never guarantees that the reader will innocently restore the
stored-up personhood (140).For the I is mobile in ways beyond the control of the writer, as we will
relate in detail below.
(2) Objectivity
Consider the same problems from the other side, that of the reader: Given the fact that a reader must
interpret the writers words, the writer has created meaning (a set of stable referents) only insofar as the
reader finds it on the page. The significance of the word happy depends upon the readers psychological
constitution and his idiosyncrasies of usage, upon his conception of sad and ecstatic, and perhaps upon
his conception of what the writer intended. Similarly, supposedly objective calendar time cannot
encapsulate time independently of how the reader unpacks it. For example, even stream-of-consciousness
writing (which once purported to lay closer o unadulterated experience) represents a convention: A reader
unfamiliar with the technique will most likely find it uncommonly unlike his own consciousness. Returning
to the use of I, the problem may be illustrated by recapitulating Barthes seemingly innocuous example of
me speaking directly to a friend in the first-person about my experiences: Barthes actually is describing what
psychologists call the fundamental attribution bias namely, that other people often believe that
my personality is more stable and homogeneous than I sense it to be. From my vantage point, I perceive that
I have freedom, but others try to collect facts about me into a cohesive image Andrew. Psychologists
and philosophers enumerate many reasons why this gap (or bias) exists.