This is the birth centenary of French theorist Roland Barthes. Born in 1915, in the midst of the First World War, his wide-ranging work is nothing short of a war on many received notions about literature, literary criticism and cultural myths. The impact of his ideas is such that writers found it difficult to write fiction without being conscious of the overpowering presence. In John Fowles’ highly influential novel “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” (1969) the intrusive narrator starts talking about characters, plot and the convention of omniscient narration in the novel and then qualifies his observation with the remark that his novel ought to be written differently from other novels because he lives in the age of Roland Barthes.
How to assess the vast body of work that Barthes has left behind? He could write on literature with as much felicity as on photography and fashion. He is both a structuralist and a poststructuralist. If he carries forward the insights of Ferdinand de Saussure in his little book “Elements of Semiology”, he is one with Louis Althusser and Jacques Derrida in his attack on ideology.
There are four important axes in the act of literary interpretation: text, context, writer and reader. There is a lot of overlap in critical approaches which focus on these categories but of these four, reader has generally been the most neglected category. Reader has been ‘discovered’ as the most important entity in literary criticism fairly recently. Barthes is a major influence in the restoration of reader to a central position in literary criticism. The new novel of the fifties and early sixties in French gets his vote because it places demands on readers.
His simple distinction between Readerly and Writerly texts is full of implications. Readerly texts are identified with classic texts which turn readers into consumers without giving them much role. They often bring about a false sense of closure and a deceptive feeling of plenitude. Writerly texts, on the other hand, give readers an active role and a freedom to approach them. Barthes considers connotation as an essential feature of a literary text calling it counter-communication. He is not ready to accept denotation as the first meaning but rather considers it ‘the last of the connotations’. In interpreting writerly texts a transitive (active) reader sees their plurality. As he writes in S/Z, ‘this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable….’
He demonstrates his method through his line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph analysis of French realist novelist Balzac’s story ‘Sarrasine’, dividing his commentary in 561 lexias (reading units). The length of Barthes’ analysis is more than six times the length of Balzac’s text. All aspects of Balzac’s text – words, sentences and paragraphs – are grouped under five different codes by Barthes. It is these codes which are employed by Balzac in his story. By extension, Barthes is saying, that all literary texts use these codes. In other words, Barthes reduces all literary writing to a matter of style. No writing is free from the use of artifice and devices.
Barthes’ position on literary writing appears close to the Russian formalist position. But his advocacy of an active reader and his distrust of all notions of innocence and naturalness can be liberating if we consider how we can easily be fooled by false propaganda masquerading as truth. There is a thin line that separates a liberating reading from an oppressive reading. With Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp becoming the major sources of information and with our tendency to read what we like, reading can really imprison us in our prejudices. It is a common practice that friends forward a news item which is forwarded to other friends. The plan to start a ‘the perfect personalized newspaper for every person in the world’ will only confirm and strengthen readers’ likes and dislikes, feeding them readerly texts.
Barthes unraveled many contemporary myths in a series of essays included in his book “Mythologies”. Many cultural myths are considered natural by the unsuspecting readers. Barthes’ penetrating analysis of these cultural myths reveals that their projected naturalness is a myth. It is because of this kind of analysis that he is considered a very important influence on the discipline of cultural studies. As texts circulating in the world tighten their grip on ‘innocent readers’, Roland Barthes’ method of reading would become even more relevant.
