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the words he finds translate his feeling, more or less inadequately,
into sequence and form; he errs. His feeling is already inscribed, like
the words in a dictionary. In this view, virtually nothing is sponta–
neous, everything is already an imitation. Even desire. according to
Rene Girard, is mediated by an external or internal model. Here again
we find the same paradigm: from entity to function, since entity is
only another name for presence or being, and the status of imitation
cannot be other than functional.
If
the ostensibly creative author does
not exist, nothing remains but the reader, and he remains only as the
interim sum of all the codes by which he has been traversed.
It
is
curious to find Barthes and other critics conceding to the reader a
worthier fate than that of the author; but the reader must be of a
certain disposition. He must not try to interpret or decipher the text
he is reading, because that would involve nothing but the attempt to
meet the author in his personality, by means of his words. To ascribe
to the text an inaugurative author would mean giving it a final
signified and closing the text at that moment. Traditional interpreta–
tion seeks
to
find, beneath the words, a source, an origin, a personal
or creative presence : when such a presence is found, interpretation is
complete. A secret · is to be discovered, out of our desire for the
replacement of bewilderment by knowledge. Barthes denounces the
attempt: the space of writing, he says, is to be ranged over, but not
pierced. The ranging is again called play, because it consists of the
refusal to fix a meaning or identify a meaning with a presence. The
reader is not allowed
to
interpret, but he is allowed to defeat
interpretation. Like the author, he is without history, biography, or
psychology: "he is simply that
someone
who holds together in a
single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted." He
is like an encyclopedia or a concordance, a place where all the
anteriority of writing is located. So a structuralist would not say: I am
reading such and such a book. The reader is "one," not
" I."
At this point it appears that recent structuralists have driven
themselves far beyond anything that Saussure would sanction . Saus–
sure was certainly more concerned with the language-system than
with the speech-acts performed under its auspices, but he allowed for
individual freedom in the production of new signs. Again, Roman
Jakobson and other formalists agreed that the degree of freedom in
language increases with the size of the unit: in the deployment of
phonemes, we are hardly free at all, but our freedom increases as we
move from phonemes
to
words, phrases, sentences, and more sen–
tences. Recent structuralists have resented this argument, lest it
