PARTISAN REVIEW
547
between art and personality is, without the anti-humanistic bias of
structuralism, a familiar neoclassi cal argument. More specifically,
some of Barthes' statements arc strikingly reminicent of Eliot's ideas
in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The originality of struc–
turalism lies in its having explicitly taken the argument to its most
extreme philosophical conclusions. At the same time, the polemical
tone in even the most tedious structuralist
clas~ification
tends to stifle
any self-critical impulses in most of the writers I've been referring to.
In
a writer as dazzling as
Barthe~,
a certain glib assertiveness becomes
particularly troubling. The philosophical assumptions about personal–
ity (or the psychological "subject" of language ) which inform much
of Western literature are not subverted simply by the use of an
analytical apparatus which leaves no place for them. As the opera–
tional model for this subversion, the application of linguistic analyses
to literary texts has too frequently involved this sleight-of-hand. The
differences between literature and phonology are often ignored. Liter–
ary texts tend to be treated as if they had the same nonreferential
status as phonemes, although Jakobson - who has said that a pho–
neme designates nothing but "a pure otherness," its difference from
other phonemes - has modified his early definition of the poetic
function and now at least allows for an "ambiguous" referential func–
tion in poetry.
Psychologically, as I suggested a moment ago, this antireferential
bias takes the form of an assault against the notion of the text's
derivation from a self already constituted . Barthes writes that"... the
I
of discourse can no longer be a place where a previously stored-up
person is innocently restored ."
On the one hand, I agree that this
affirmation is a necessary " weapon against the general 'bad faith ' of
discourse which would make literary form simply the expression of
an interiority constituted previous to and outside of language." Much
of contemporary art is
inacces.~ible
to us as long as we ignore its
attempt - or perhaps we should say its pretention - to create its
own reality wholly through the temporal and spatial dispositions of
the materials it uses. Composition is
~elf-promoting,
which would
mean both that the verbal occasions within a text provide sufficient
sources of inspiration for the development of the text, and also that
these verbal expansions actually give form to a self discovered and
perhaps even in\"ented
by
the literary text. Robbe-Grillet has been the
