BACHELARD TO BARTHES
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American critics. But the best textual cnncs, whatever complexities
and ambiguities they may find in the literary object, have deliberately
refused to locate the
subject
of a text beyond its particular verbal
organizations. There is no "intention" behind an image outside the
cont~xt
in which
it
is used. The French critics' rejection of this
premise accounts for what must seem to American readers like a
scandalous indifference to "what the text says," by which we of
course mean the immediate verbal environment. For the French the
subject of a text is not the attitudes it demonstrably organizes, but
rather an intentionality which contexts may obscure, or the working
out of a structural coherence and intelligibility which only a kind of
X ray of the text can reveal. The text is, so to speak, taken apart
in order to
be
put together again, this time
in
a structure which,
you might argue, is simply the critic's hypothesis. This is true, but
it
is
beside the point: every interpretation is a hypothesis, and the
structuralist hypothesis at least has the merit of being a reenactment
of that meaningful intention which, more than any specific meanings,
may he the subject of literature.
The results of this approach for practical criticism should be
clear. A character in a play or a novel, for example,
is
not explained
in terms of his "lifelike" richness or moral and psychological proba–
bility, but is rather understood as a functional necessity in the crea–
tion of a coherent system. Thus, Barthes's interpretations of Racine
depend on a redistribution of the contexts of specific dramatic state–
ments. The originality of his approach is, as it were, in a fidelity to
the "work" achieved by a certain neglect of the "text." In any "real–
istic" reading of
Britannicus
and
Phedre,
Neron and Phedre are ob–
jectively guilty of crimes. But when their guilt is seen in relation to
the Racinian heroes' abortive attempts to break away from an author–
ity both hated and loved, it could be thought of as an alibi, as a
functional necessity in order to protect the "father" from being direct–
ly accused and to allow the "son" to remain in the dubious security
of the tragic enclosure. Barthes's interpretive system
is,
as you can
see, psychoanalytic, but he seeks no
causal
explanation of Phedre's
guilt outside of its place in the structure of what he calls
homo raci–
nianus.
His study, like Richard's reconstruction of Mallarme (al–
though Barthes, unlike Richard, limits himself to Racine's works), is
one of those original and disconcerting "portraits" of contemporary
French criticism. He neither studies the plays
in
detail nor is he
