28
PARTISAN REVIEW
Now the creation of the paraliterary in the more recent work of
these men is of course the result of theory-their own theories in
operation, so to speak. And these theories run exactly counter to the
notion that there is a work, X, behind which there stand a group of
meanings, A, B, or C, to which the hermeneutic task of the critic gives
us access by unpacking, revealing, breaking through, peeling back the
literal surface of the work. But by saying that there is not,
behind
the
literal surface, a set of meanings to which it points, or models to which
it refers, a set of originary terms onto which it opens and from which it
derives its own authenticity, by denying these, this theory is not
prolonging the life of formalism and saying what
Mr.
Dickstein claims
"we all know" -that writing is about writing. For in that formula a
different object is substituted for the term "about" and so instead of a
work's being "about" the July Monarchy or death and money, it is seen
to
be "about" its own strategies of construction, its own operations of
language, its own revelation of convention, its own surface. And in this
formulation it is the Author or Literature rather than the World or
Truth that is the source of its authenticity.
Now it is in Mr. Dickstein's view of this theory-that it is a jazzed
up, technocratized version of formalism, that its message is that writing
is about writing, and that in a work like
S/ Z
Barthes's "purpose is to
preserve and extract the 'multiplicity of the text's meanings" -that we
come not only to the point where there is no agreement whatever
between us, but also to the second possible reason why this theory has
left the wider critical establishment of this country in such virginal
condition. For I would say that whereas that establishment-and I am
speaking of a practice that is not university-connected-has not been
largely ignorant of the work of Barthes or Derrida or Lacan, it has
misconceived or misconstrued it. For, to use the example that
Mr.
Dickstein has provided us,
S/ Z
is precisely not the preservation and
extraction of "the multiplicity of the text's meanings." Nor is it what
the jacket copywriter for the American edition claims: the semantic
dissection of a Balzac novella, "in order to uncover layers of un–
suspected meanings and connotations." For both these notions–
"extraction" and "dissection" -presuppose an activity that is not
Barthes's own, just as they arise from a view of the literary object that is
precisely the one that Barthes wishes not so much to attack as
to
dispel.
For "extract" and "dissect" assume a certain relation between denota–
lion and connotation as they function within the literary text. Those
verbs assume, that is, the primacy of the denotative, the literal utter–
ance, beyond which lies the rich vein of connotation or association or
meaning. Everything in our common sense conspires to tell us that this
