BACHELARD TO BARTHES
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inspirations-of art are at least partly internal to the conditions in
which art works in order to create meaning. Psychology, in literature
and in life, may be a structural necessity, a function of intelligibility
rather than a preexistent reality which language merely seeks to
make intelligible.
But it is precisely this insight into the relation between meaning
and the processes that create it which, I think, reveals the limitations
of the structuralist approach. For what are the mental activities in
which, so to speak, a rage for intelligibility actually creates content
and determines meaning? Nothing could describe more accurately
the way in which our dreams "signify." In dreams, events and people
from our waking life lose their personalities in order to become pure
functions. I have, in my past, created certain intelligible structures
as a way of interpreting the world once and for all. And when I
dream, my unconscious uses my boss to signify my mother and my
brother to signify me for the sake of immobilizing my present experi–
ence in the security of those past structures. In the same way, neurotic
behavior is a marvel of structural coherence: nothing that happens
to the neurotic escapes the protective, deathlike order which he op–
poses
to the structural incoherence of events in time. The unconscious
is the original structuralist. Perhaps the greatest popular illusion about
unconscious activity is that it is chaotic and incoherent; it strikes me
as far more probable that its life is a tautology of beautifully and
absurdly intelligible structures.
To the extent that literature, like all other human activities, ex–
presses that unrelenting subordination of life to intelligibility which
appears to characterize the unconscious, it is of course analyzable in
structuralist terms. Much of the appeal of literature is undoubtedly in
the almost magic spectacle it offers--and which Poulet, Richard and
Barthes brilliantly reenact for us-of a mind in the process of reducing
life to a purely formal expressiveness. The search for the structure of
a literary work is analogous to the interpretation of dreams. What
Barthes and Mauron discover is that Racine's situations (like the
events of our conscious life in dreams) disguise a persistently distorting
structure in which, for example, the psychological differences between
Hermione, Oreste and Andromaque are less important than their
place in an interpretive system where they all
function
as Pyrrhus's
''father.'' Racine is of course the ideal subject for the structuralist
demonstration: the rigid, repetitive intelligibility of Racinian violence
