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PARTISAN REVIEW
that one can say is that in the work that follows
Mythologies,
Barthes
seems either to accept the divisions as insurmountable, or, which
amounts to the same thing, to allow one of the terms of the division to
devour the 'other term. The equivalent of the ex-nomination of the
bourgeois occurs in the triumph of semiosis, the absorption of reality
into that willful activity of language which Barthes calls
ecriture.
In one of his essays on Sade, in
Sade Loyola Fourier,
Barthes
cheerfully acknowledges that the meaning (semiosis) distorts what is
represented (mimesis), and then proceeds to dismiss the mimetic aspect
of Sade's work: "It is on the level of meaning not of the referent, that we
should read him." The interest of Sade is in the system of words or
linguistic units rather than in the admittedly monotonous cruelty of
the action. Barthes's claim for Sade resembles a conservative exercise in
the domestication of the text: which, of course, it is not intended to be.
Whether language and reality are cut apart from each other (the
surgical image in Barthes's) or whether reality is simply absorbed into
or distorted by language (Barthes is not consistent), the result is the
same: reality never confronts language as a test of its significance, its
values, its truth. Sade's greatness lies in his virtuosic manipulation of a
vast system of discourse that he has created, not in "having celebrated
crime, perversion, nor in having employed in this celebration a radical
language." Barthes finds support for his reading in Sade's plausible
claim that "I have conceived all that can be conceived along that line,
but I have certainly not done every thing I have conceived and I shall
certainly never do it. " And surely as Barthes notes "the complexity of
the combinations, the partner's contortions, the potency of ejacula–
tions, and the victim's endurance all surpass human nature: one would
need several arms, several skins, the body of an acrobat, and the ability
to achieve orgasm
ad infinitum."
But the evident truth of this claim, so
wittily and persuasively phrased, conceals a sleight of hand that is
intended
to
disparage an interest in realism per se (of a Balzac or a
Tolstoy, for example). "Why not test the realism of a work," Barthes
asks, "by examining not the more or less exact way in which it
reproduces reality, but on the contrary the way in which reality could
or could not effectuate the novel's utterance?" The question raised
about Balzac and Tolstoy would receive a quite different answer from
the one raised about Sade. But the more important point to make is
that Barthes asks the question in a rhetorical manner, clearly interested
in the way in which reality
can not
effectuate the novel's utterance.
What occupies Barthes is that aspect of a work which is autonomous,
irreducible, free of the constraints of reality.
