PARTISAN REVIEW
551
The "recit" doesn' t make us see anything, it doesn't imitate any–
thing; the passion which may excite us as we read a novel doesn' t
belong to a "vision" (in fact, we "see" nothing) , it is rather the
passion of meaning, that is, of a higher order of relationships, an
order which has its particular emotions, its hopes, its threats, its
triwnphs. "What happens" in the "recit" is, from the referential
(real) point of view, strictly
nothing;
"what happens" is just lan–
guage, the adventure of language, and its advent is constantly an
occasion for celebration.
The logic of composition, Barthes also writes, has "an emancipatory
value": if men always introduce into the stories they tel! that which
they have known in their lives, they do so in a form which doesn't
merely repeat life but which offers us an open-ended model of con–
tinuous creation - "a form which has triumphed over repetition and
which establishes the pattern for a process of becoming." The time of
literature doesn't have to be thought of as referential or derivative;
the temporal system of discourse may be constituted
within
discourse
by the relation between the speaker and his utterance.
Our own relation to literature - indeed, to any type of human
utterance - can be, as Foucault has emphasized, either analytical or
interpretative. The science of literature as the structuralists understand
it - and which I have treated here with considerable skepticism –
seems to call for an analytical approach, one which rejects what we
ordinarily think of as the critical interpretation of literature. Histor–
ically, this rejection is understandable. Indeed, a critique of interpreta–
tion is already implicit in the interpretive method of Freud. As
Eugenio Donato puts it in his excellent summary at the John Hopkins
symposium of conflicting trends in modern thought, " . .. Freud . ..
was the first to see that interpretation was not normative but, at best,
that it uncovers a number of phantasms which are themselves already
interpretations." The interminable psychoanalytical cure is not in it–
self an argument against psychoanalytical theory; it reflects the na–
ture of the instrument of understanding in psychoanalysis. To use
Donato's summary of remarks by Foucault and Derrida: "There is
nothing to interpret, for each sign is in itself not the thing that offers
itself to interpretation but interpretation of other signs." There is no
"founding origin" of neurosis, or indeed of the self. The "nostalgia
for origins," which Derrida finds even in Levi-Strauss, expresses our
attachment to all those myths of a central presence which Derrida
