470
PARTISAN REVIEW
has it copied, transforming the female statue into Adonis. This tale so disgusts
the Marquise that she breaks her bargain with the narrator and resolves on a
life ofChristian virtue, which resolution, it is obvious to the reader, will never
last.
To read this text in a "writerly" way, Barthes first eliminates its illusory
unity or integrity. He "stars" the text into 561 "lexias," fragments which
he
reads according to five "codes":
the
hermeneutic is
the
text's pattern of
puzzle and suspense; the semic, its pattern of "characters";
the
symbolic
projects rhetorical patterns into large structures; the proairetic produces plot;
and the reference or cultural code is thematic and didactic. Interspersed
among
these
lexias and their analyses according to codes are 93 brief essays,
whose very digressiveness further separates the text from any ideology of unity
or totality . The critical and' 'writerly" reading of the text provides a playful,
ludic advantage, that is, it multiplies possible meanings and does not try
to
reach any ultimate, determinate, univocal meaning behind or beyond
the
text's surface. Criticism is to the text as the text is to reality: the object in both
cases is a "citation," an "already written," not a brute "thing," but a
"meaning" which is transcribed or rewritten within a new
system
of
meanlOgs.
Barthes opposes the "writerly" value in texts to the" readerly," which
tries to build closed, univocal structures by accumulating significant
elements
of the text into unities. These structures fit together and reinforce each other,
all united under a comprehensive "law" of the textual
system's
structure .
The
ancient model for such an analysis is Aristotle's
Poetics,
along with its arche–
typical example,
Oedipus.
The modern example is the formalist and rhetori–
cal analysis of' 'organic unity." This' 'readerly" analysis, Barthes asserts, is an
authoritarian intimidation which wants to silence the indeterminable plural–
ity of the "writerly." Holistic criticism turns the text into a fetish.
The
Aristotelian logic which tries to gather signifying
elements
of a text into
the
large unities of class and category may, Barthes hopes, "provoke
the
nausea
brought on by any appropriative violence."
A number of objections may occur to a reader who has not been swept
along by Barthes's rhetoric or simply terrorized by his scorn for the bourgeois
ideologues of realism. If we patiently examine his assertions with an inde–
pendent mind, they frequently break down . For example, Barthes asserts that
discourse can present action three ways: simply name an action and state its
meaning ; or describe the action and its meaning in detail; or describe the
action while leaving meaning unstated. Barthes
goes
on, "The first two
realms, in terms of which signification is
excessively
named, impose a dense
plenitude of meaning or, if
one
prefers, a certain redundancy, a kind of
semantic prattle typical of the archaic-or infantile-era of modern discourse ,
