THE STATE OF CRITICISM
417
tions to the unconscious of his patients, while Barthes applies it to find
previously unknown or unnoticed meanings in literary texts.
But long before then, Barthes had strayed from literary criticism.
In his
Mythologies,
short pieces originally published as critiques of
evolving consumerism, he had been most political, frontally attacking
bourgeois society. And his
Systeme de la mode
had been an attempt to
show, with the help of structural linguistics, in how many ways the
media penetrates our minds. He simultaneously worked out his
semiologie
and his sociology of fashion. But by 1969, Barthes found
that neither of these systems really worked. And he became increasingly
concerned with literary texts. This return
to
literature proper, however,
coincided with the events of May-June 1968; it would seem that Barthes
along with everyone else had to gain time and distance, in order to
absorb what had happened. There also might have been a connection
between the return of subjectivity and the failure either to predict or to
understand the breakdown of the French political and social system.
Though not directly linked to the intellectuals' linguistically oriented
systems, this near breakdown did seem to lead them to focus more on
ruptures and less on underlying unity. Whatever the reason, however,
there was a shift in Barthes's thinking.
Sarrasine,
with its five codes and
with the stress on making new connections by new readers, was a novel
attempt to break out of the semiologie without invalidating it. And his
increasing emphasis on play, on irony, and on uncovering uncon–
scious thoughts in dead authors by live readers, was both an avoidance
of political commentary as well as an expression of the acceptance of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. For Lacan 's lectures, and their publication
in the 1960s, bol stered the importance. or the acceptance of playing on
words. Lacan 's
languisteries,
the multiple meanings of words, as we
know, play on linguistic transpositions as well as on free-association.
Lacan is more clever than Freud: his connections not only are to
uncover an analysand's unconscious, but use Lacan's unconscious for
public performances. And performance, as part of the ambiance French
intellectuals inhabit, has enhanced literary structuralism and has
helped to popularize the work of Lacan and Barthes.
When structuralism is transplanted
to
America, it lacks this larger
intellectual audience. In addition, American Freudians have not reread
Freud as a Lacanian text, and with few exceptions, such as the group
around
Yale French Studies,
they don't understand the added complex–
ities of unconscious signifiers and signifieds that interact with yet other
unconsicous elements, and that have meaning only as relationships.
Few people outside Lacan 's circle really bother to understand him, a
