STATE OF CRITICISM
29
should be so. But Barthes, for whom common sense is the enemy, due
to
its unshakeable habit of fashioning everything on the model of
nature, is trying
to
demonstrate the opposite, trying to prove that
denotation is the effect of connotation, the last block to be put in place.
S/Z
is a demonstration of the way that systems of connotations,
stereotypes, cliches, gnomic utterances, in short the always already–
known, already-eAperienced, already-gi ven-within-a-culture concate–
nate to produce a text. And further, he is claiming, it is not only this
connotational system that writes the text, but it is, literally, what we
read, when we read the literary work. Nothing is buried here that has to
be "extracted"; it is all part of the surface of the text. In identifying
connotational systems as codes, Barthes writes, "To depict is
to
unroll
the carpet of the codes, to refer not from a language to a referent, but
from one code to another. Thus, realism consists not in copying the
real but in copying a (depicted) copy of the real. ... This is why
realism cannot be designated a 'copier' but rather a 'pasticheur'
(through secondary mimesis, it copies what is already a copy)."
The painstaking, almost hallucinatory slowness with which
Barthes proceeds through the text of
Sarrasine
provides an extraordi–
nary demonstration of this chattering of voices which is that of the
codes at work. And if Barthes has a purpose, it is to isolate these codes
by applying a kind of spotlight to each instance of them, to expose
them "as so many fragments of something that has always been already
read, seen, done, experienced."
It
is also to make them heard as voices
"whose origin," he says, "is lost in the vast perspective of the already–
written" and whose interweaving acts to "de-originate the utterance."
It is as impossible to reconcile this project of Barthes's with formalism
as it is to revive within it the heartbeat of humanism. To take the
demonstration of the de-originated utterance seriously would obvi–
ously put a large segment of the critical establishment out of business;
it is thus no wonder that post-structuralist theory should have had so
little effect in that quarter.
But as Mr. Dickstein points out, there is another place where this
work has met with a rather different reception , and that is in the
graduate schools where students, whatever their other concerns might
be, are interested in reading. And these students, having experienced
the collapse of a modernist literature, have turned to the literary
product of post-modernism-one of the most powerful examples of
which is the paraliterary work produced by Barthes and Derrida,
among others.
If
one of the tenets of modernist literature had been to
create a work that would force reflection on the conditions of its own
construction, that would insist on reading as a much more consciously
