24
PARTISAN REVIEW
evaluate. He is now free to engage in an activity resembling, but quite
different from, practical criticism: the inventing or reinventing of the
text. This idea of the reinvention of the text has its anticipators in the
New Criticism. R.P. Blackmur spoke of a good reading of a poem as
the making of another poem and Kenneth Burke's way of talking about
literature implied indeterminacy in its erosion of the boundaries
between texts. But neither critic gives us in performance anything like
the self-reflexivity of Roland Barthes's
51Z,
still the "classic" expres–
sion (to use a term repugnant to Barthes) of the new New Criticism.
My account of the indeterminancy of the text may suggest that the
text offers no resistance-which, of course, is not the case. Part of the
pleasure or excitement of Barthes's reading is in the overcoming or
shattering of the resistance of the text. The critic explodes or liberates
the text, the agents of repression being the novelist's discursiveness and
the narrative binding of the tale: its plot.
In
51Z
Roland Barthes is the
kind of critic against whom the mere writer doesn't have a chance. The
political and military imagery is not fortuitous. Barthes and some of
his associates in the
Tel quel
group have displaced an anarchic radical
political energy found in the streets of Paris to the activity of criticism.
Without the trace of a political motive, the American version of this
critical attitude seems like an exercise in narcissism. Narcissism: the
term has been transvalued by Barthes and others, who welcome and
celebrate it. But the narcissism is of a particularly disciplined kind. For
all of the deconstructive fireworks of
51
Z, it is clear that Barthes is not
free to say anything he pleases about the text: he is constrained by his
five codes, and those codes are not eccentric personal inventions.
Barthes works within the discipline of Saussurian linguistics. I am not
judging the scientific adequacy of Barthesian semiology. I simply want
to qualify the hostile view of Barthes and others as exponents of
unbridled, irresponsible critical subjectivity.
In
51Z
Barthes has found
a way of reconciling science and narcissism.
Criticism, as Barthes practices it, suggests Derrida's erased or
cancelled sign: a simultaneous assertion and denial of the reality of the
text. Balzac's text is fully present in Barthes's presentation, but so
defamiliarized (I am assuming our initial encounter with it) that we
hardly recognize it-as
if
the "practical critic" were, as Morris Dick–
stein strikingly suggests, a highly intelligent Martian. According to
Barthes, criticism is sanctioned neither by its empirical fidelity to the
text ("its task is not to discover truths") nor by the authority of its
motive or purpose ("the language each critic chooses to speak does not
come down to him from Heaven"), but by its own internal validity, for
