THE STATE OF CRITICISM
403
represent an attempt to recover lost ground or move back from
functions to entities. Barthes's
S I
Z is perhaps the most exhaustive
attempt to ·read a text without positing an author who might be
disclosed in his freedom, or even in such freedom as is consistent with
temporality and finitude . The book is well established, so it is
unnecessary
to
describe it in detail. I would remark, though, that its
basic motive is directed against a bourgeois society which insists on
having signs that don't look like signs or don 't acknowledge their
character as signs: such a society, according to Barthes, craves the
consolation of thinking that its signs are transparent, that you can
look through them to an authentic reality which exists independently
of the signs. Barthes wants to force his readers to admit that their
signs are signs: indeed, that the signifier must be released from its
bondage to the signified. In reading Balzac's
Sarrasine,
we are to seek
out the play of the codes, not the plan of the work. We are to produce
the work, not merely consume it or interpret it, two activities pretty
nearly- identical. The text is to be performed, rather than read: the
reader is himself a plurality of other texts, so he should engage in the
play of codes, taking all the parts in the play.
It
may appear that I have strayed from my duty, which was to
point and keep pointing
to
a certain gesture, paradigm, or pattern
which I find inhabiting structuralists like a nervous tic; the rush from
entities to functions. On the contrary, I find the evidence of
S IZ
decisive in precisely this regard: the world itself is deemed to be a
function according to Barthes's rhetoric. At the beginning of the book
he distinguishes between works readerly and writerly: readerly books
are parsimonious in offering plurality of meanings, writerly books are
lavish in that respect. "The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon
which no
consequent
language (which would inevitably make it past)
can be superimposed; the writerly text is
ourselves writing,
before the
infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed,
intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology,
Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the
opening of networks, the infinity of language." Note that the phrase
"the world as function " glosses "the infinite play of the world": one
comes immediately after the other in a parenthesis. The phrases are
synonymous. It is only under the auspices of play that the world
becomes function rather than presence: outside or beyond the infinite
field of play, the world is congenial or oppressive but it is imperi–
ously present, we are enclosed in it. Doesn' t this prompt us to say that
in moving from entities to functions, or rather in making entities
