EUGENE GOODHEART
209
In
his preface to
Sade Loyola Fourier,
Barthes anticipates the
criticism that he may be engaged in an exercise of domestication by
reasserting the theme of
Mythologies.
Since "there is no language site
outside bourgeois ideology, the only possible rejoinder is neither
confrontation nor destruction but theft," i.e., the appropriation of the
language of the tests for his own purposes.
The manner of the demystifier remains, but its content, so to
speak, has been dissolved. Demystification presupposes not only the
existence of a substantial reality anterior to its expression, it also
assumes the possible ideal transparency of language, so that reality can
always challenge the words which are supposed
to
express it.
It
is the
assumption that lies behind Pascal's performance in
The Provincial
Letters;
it is the basis of Orwell's confidence in the power of decent and
capable men to express the truth about reality.
The belief in the transparency of expression has always been a
bete
noire
for Barthe , who disposed of its claims on ideological grounds in
the early work
Writing Degree Zero,
by attributing it to the classical
period in which the bourgeoisie began its rise
to
power. On linguistic
grounds, Barthes views clarity as an illusion, which simply ignores the
hermetic self-enclosed character of all semiotic systems. The failure of
language to be perspicuous to reality is not an occasion for regret. For
Barthes it is the obverse of the power, the pleasure and the freedom of
the literary mode. Barthes' allegiance to verbal hermeticism (it is
clearly not a limitation for Barthes) is an expression of a residual
commitment to mystery. The "unspoken depths of reality" have
entered into language itself.
For all of Barthes's capacity for demystification, his temperament
goes counter to it. To demy tify is to be out of sympathy with the text.
The demystifier invents a structure against the visible structure of the
text.
In
the act of making his structure visible he may pass from the
condition of impotence
to
the ill usion of power. But it is an illusion
based on the sense of excl usion and informed by resentment.
If
demystification originally and ideally represented an effort to restore
the truth and integrity of things, it has become both a vision and a
condition of alienation, a symptom of powerlessness and a vain
attempt to compensate for it. The demystifier's unfulfillment becomes
a kind of asceticism, a mark of spiritual superiority. Hedonist that he
is, Barthes finds the spirituality of unfulfillment uncongenial.
The social expression of a fulfilled condition is aristocratic society
in which values have an impressive physical incarnation: impene–
trable, irreducible, and poetic in Barthes's sense. The aesthetic appear-
