210
PARTISAN REVIEW
ances of the aristocratic world have an ultimate reality that precludes
the possibility of demystification. When Jane Austen evokes Pemberley
Estate (in
Pride and Prejudice),
she presents an unproblematic, un–
alienated set of values, immediately apprehendable in our visualization
of the estate.
. . . It
was a large, handsome, SLOne building, standing well on rising
ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills;-and in front, a
stream of some natural imporLance was swelled into greater, but
without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor
falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place
for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been
so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them
warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt, that to be
mistress of PemberJey might be something!
In the depiction of Pemberley Estate, nature and art are indissolubly
wedded, each preserving its integrity without cost to the other, a
condition that leaves nothing to be desired and gives no reason for
demystification. In contrast to the fullness of aristocratic life associated
with its relation to the land, demystification which exposes emptiness
would seem
to
be linked to capitalism.
As
Balzac has shown and
Barthes has noted, Parisian riches are founded on the emptiness of
financial speculation.
For Roland Barthes, criticism is the creation of a verbal space,
comparable to an aristocratic estate, in which one is provided with
pleasures impossible in contemporary reality. Among those pleasures,
Barthes somewhat furtively imports "charms (not values) of the
bourgeois art of living" which from the point of view of socialism or
whatever we call the society that transcends bourgeois society, would be
a kind of exoticism: the revolutionary conscience continues, however,
to
trouble. "What rises up against this dream is the spectre of totality,
which demands that the bourgeois phenomenon be condemned
entire,
and that any leak of the signified be punished."
(Roland Barthes
by
Roland Barthes). The critical intelligence names and classifies the
objects of the space, which it has created and rules like a god. It is as if
the metaphor of the writer creating a world is literalized or substan–
tiated. The body of the world enters the process of writing, so that
writing becomes a physical presence equivalent
to
reality. This is
Barthes's myth of
ecriture.
The bodily character of
ecriture
has interesting political implica–
tions. Bodies are finite and individual, not infinite and universal. Each
person's verbal space is sacrosanct, just as each person's body is
