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LEO BERSANI
that one day we will be able to construct other functional models
"capable of modifying individuals and collectivities toward new .
axiological structuring processes." The occasionally manifest, usually
latent content of the structuralist dream is the perennially appealling
fantasy of total control.
The impoverishment of experience which this dream involves
is
constantly illustrated in the structuralists' application of linguistic and
rhetorical terms to the literary texts they discuss. There is a kind of
name-giving frenzy in structuralist writing - a confusion between
labels and analyses - examples of which we have seen in the cate–
gories Genette uses for Proust as well as in those Barthes applies to
Goldfinger.
To conclude this survey, I should mention another dis–
tinction from Benveniste, one which Barthes makes theoretically inter–
esting but which leads nowhere when he and Todorov use it for
specific analyses. This is the distinction between the two levels in
"enonciation" of story (or "recit") and discourse. The issue is crucial
as far as the absence of the subject goes, since Benveniste insists that
in the pure "recit" no one speaks: we have facts without the in–
tervention of a narrator. But the uselessness of this distinction for
most of the literature we know is nicely illustrated in Todorov's curious
attempt, in his Johns Hopkins paper, to sift out what belongs to story
and what belongs to discourse in a couple of sentences from
A La
R echerche du temps perdu.
He concludes with some dignity by
admitting that "the interpenetration of these two categories is mani–
festly great and already poses, in itself, multiple problems which have
not yet been broached." But the " problems" are artificially created
by an approach to the text which starts out with an unworkable ab–
stract distinction and proceeds as if it were a perversity of literature
to mix two things which were separated in the first place only in the
critic's formalistic imagination. The time wasted with this distinction
is another consequence of the ambition to redefine the subject of hu–
man discourse - an ambition which has been responsible for both
the worst in structuralist thought and, as we must now see, the best.
Barthes, whose mania for classification has, happily, always been
undermined by a genius for the eloquently comprehensive statement,
ends his introduction to the issue of
Communications
on narrative
with a distinction which I like to think might have pleased the Henry
J ames of the Prefaces :
