20
PARTISAN REVIEW
appealing deceptions, its false continuity and lifelikeness, "the 'glue'
of the readeriy," which attaches "narrated events together with a kind
of logical 'paste. '"
If
an extremely observant, articulate, and highly
cerebral Martian had arrived on Earth and immediately been handed a
novel to read, this is the account of it he might have produced. As
always, Barthes transposes the concrete into the abstract, and falls into
overanalysis and wild hyperbole. Yet somehow, quite wonderfully,
Barthes has managed to create the frame of mind of a man reading a
novel for the first time, amazed at the concatenation of "events" into
the simulation of a story, of "life." In his very anger at this
trompe–
l'oeil
Barthes has succeeded in accounting for the almost indescribable
feeling of wonder that lies at the root of our affinity for stories. But in
doing this he also becomes the viewer who stares too long and too
closely at a painting, until it becomes just dots and patches of pigment.
Finally, he projects on the narrative the very suspicion with which he
himself greets and examines it.
The fear of "the scandal of some illogicality, some disturbance of
'common sense,''' that Barthes attributes to the classical narrative, may
be news to those whose literary taste is guided by the Prix Goncourt,
but most of us have long understood that realism is a set of literary
conventions rather than a direct reflection of reality, that life rarely
duplicates the pattern of a well-made plot, that dialogue is a stylized
suggestion of the real, not naturalistic transcription, and that realism,
like all other conventions of discourse, has social and ideological
presuppositions that should be of interest to the critic. But Barthes
attacks realism only in its most naive sense-of art as a photographic
duplication of reality-rather than the more subtle concept of social
representation developed by Lukacs, Auerbach, and others. Barthes's
assault on realism, carried out within the textual terrain of one of its
greatest practitioners, is an extension of his demystification of the
mythologies of popular culture, where he shows that what looks naive
and natural is really a manipulative system of signs. Performed
virtually without reference to Balzac's other work, it is also an attack on
the very idea of the Author, " that somewhat decrepit deity of the old
criticism," who "can or could some day become a text like any other: he
has only to avoid making hi person the subject, the impulse, the
origin, the authority, the Father. " But by denying the personal element
in both narrative and authorship, by concentrating so much on the
mechanics of verisimilitude, Barthes virtually jettisons the human
element in literature, which all but the Martian can recognize and
respond to. Far from passing beyond formalism; he simply dilates its
concern with technique into more grand and subjective terms.
