M.H. ABRAMS
567
author is dead: his civil status, his biographical person, have disap–
peared." The necrology extends to the human reader, and indeed to
man himself, who is reduced to an illusion engendered by the play of
language, or as Foucault puts it,
to
"a simple fold in our knowledge,"
destined to "disappear as soon as that knowledge has found a new
form."
In
these new writings about reading, accordingly, the author
deliquesces into writing-as-such and the reader into reading-as-such,
and what writing-as-such effects and reading-as-such engages is not a
work of literature but a text, writing,
ecriture.
In
its turn the text
forfeits its status as a purposeful utterance about human beings and
human concerns, and even its individuality, becoming simply an
episode in an all-encompassing textuality-dissolved, as Edward Said
has remarked, into "the communal sea of Iinguicity." Consonantly, the
relations between authors which had traditionally been known as
"influence" are depersonalized into "intertextuality," a reverberation
between ownerless sequences of signs.
It
might be expected that, evacuated of its humanity, reading-as–
such would become an interplay of bloodless abstractions. Quite
to
the
contrary. We find in French structuralist criticism and its American
analogues that reading is a perilous adventure-not of a soul among
masterpieces, but of the unsouled reading-process as it engages with
the text-as-such. Persistently this inhuman encounter is figured in a
rhetoric of extremity, as tense with the awareness of risk and crisis;
anguished by doubts about its very possibility; meeting everywhere in
the"
action du signifiant"
with violence, disruption, castration, myste–
rious disappearances, murder, self-destruction; or as overcome by
vertigo as the ground falls away and leaves it suspended over an abyss
of recessive meanings in a referential void.
In
this Gothic context of the
horrors of reading it is a relief to come upon Roland Barthes's
The
Pleasure of the Text,
with its seeming promise to revive the notion, as
old as Aristotle and Horace, that the distinctive aim of a literary work is
to give pleasure
to
its readers. But then we find in Barthes's account
that the pleasure is not in the artful management of the human agents,
interactions, and passions signified by the text, but in the engagement
with the text-as-such, and that Barthes adapts the traditional concept to
current connoisseurs of textuality by a running conceit, sustained by
double entendres, in which textual pleasure is assimilated to sexual
pleasure; the prime di.5tinction is between the mere
plaisir
effected by a
comfortably traditional text and the orgasmic rapture,
jouissance,
in
the close encounter with a radical "modern" text which, by foiling the
reader's expectations, "brings to a crisis his relations with language."
It
seems safe to predict that the innocent reader, seduced by Barthes's
