BACHELARD TO BARTHES
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cent structurali t critics, who have become intrigued by the possibility
of finding structures entirely independent of individual histories and
intentions. But already in Poulet and Richard one sees the possibility
of that "science of literature" which Barthes speaks of and which
would make literature superfluous, or which would at least, Barthes
warns, leave aside, as a "residue," "genius, art, humanity." For if the
processes
of "signification" are the subject of literature, then the
specific meanings of literary works can be thought of as obscuring
the laws which make them possible. Even more radically, if the con–
ditions for creating meaning are objective and universal, then litera–
ture-indeed all human expression-is endlessly tautological.
As
Philippe Sollers has announced, everything that has been written "is
only a particular and limited case of writing
(ecriture)."
And so we find ourselves as nostalgic for absolute certainties as
poor Picard. But of course the stakes are now higher. "There is a
truth about literature or, even better, about the mind," the struc–
turalists might say, "on which we can all agree." The master dis–
cipline of the new science would be linguistics. The structuralists
have enthusiastically accepted the linguists' argument that the internal
tructure of every type of social discourse is organized on the model
of the structure of language. The specificity of literature is that of a
connotative discourse; its science would be the classification of those
"figures" which are, as Gerard Genette writes, "the inner space of
language," or the variously shaped spaces between a sign and its
meaning, between a signifier (what the poet actually says) and the
thing signified (the poet's virtual language). Criticism and linguistics
thus meet on the common ground of rhetoric. The interest of Barthes
and Genette in the science of rhetoric is nothing less than the ambi–
tion to establish an exhaustive code of literary connotations. Thus,
peculiarly enough, the object returns, this time not as the text, but
as the "literary function" itself. An illusion? That remains to be
seen; any thorough critique of structuralism would probably have to
be made within a more general critique of scientific ambitions to
describe the programming of the brain. So far, at any rate, linguistic
and rhetorical analyses of literature have been disappointing. It was
in fact a Belgian linguist, Nicolas Ruwet, who, in a paper read at
last October's symposium at Johns Hopkins on "The Languages of
Criticism and The Sciences of Man," emphasized both the gaps in
current linguistic analyses of literary texts (for example, the absence
