THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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appeared to accord,
to
a character. So they displace every seemingly
identifying quality by removing it from subject to predicate; that is,
from the subject as an illusory person or individual to a set of
predicates which may easily enough be called roles, functions, or (in
Greimas's term) actants.
In
S I
Z, Barthes says that a character is
created "when identical semes traverse the same proper name several
times and appear to settle upon it." (The seme is the unit of the
signifier.)
In
this emphasis a character's name acts as a magnetic field
for the semes. Clearly, what the word "character" refers to is not a
symbolic identity, or even a configuration of illusory attributes, but a
name marking the site on which certain similar semes intersect. This
is compatible with Barthes's insistence, in
S I
Z and other books, that
one's subjectivity is merely "the wake of all the codes which constitute
me, so that my subjectivity has ultimately the generality of stereo–
types." Each person is merely the wake left by the motion of a ship:
the ship is the structure of relevant codes, relevant to the society and
time in which he lives. Lacan opposes any philosophy that issues
from the
cogito,
and argues that it is language as symbolic system
which gives the human person his function as subject. The person is
endlessly displaced and reconstituted by the passage of his desire
through the symbolic order of language. Language is the categorical
form of otherness: contact with it makes the subject possible.
The pattern I am describing is a pattern of desire, the structural–
ist desire to find that an entity does not exist, that it is a mere
mystification. So the critic tries
to
demystify entities and replace them
by functions. Entities are enjoyed only in their disappearance; dis–
course only when it has disavowed every trace of ontology. A classic
moment in this enterprise is provided by Barthes's essay on the death
of the author, which identifies writing with the destruction of every
voice, every point of origin. "Writing," according to Barthes, "is that
neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the
negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the
body writing." Mallarme is a structuralist hero because he advocated a
process by which language replaces the person traditionally supposed
to be its lord and master; the person, traditionally recognized in the
rhetorical power of his voice.
In
structuralist terms, the writer does
not exist before the writing, he is born with his text, he is not the
subject for whom the book is predicate. Furthermore, what he writes
is already written, on ly the order of the words is changed, the writer
can only "imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original."
If
a writer is naive enough to think that his feeling is original, and that
