Page 93 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

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eternal”. By so naturalizing the historically contingent, myth proves
fundamentally supportive of the social status quo. Hence Barthes’s
famous observation that: “Statistically, myth is on the right”. At
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this point in his intellectual career Barthes himself was still, of course,
on the left. Indeed, the essay provides an excellent example of the
way in which structuralism as demystification can be linked to an
adversarial intellectual stance. In Mythologies, as in the later Elements
of Semiology and The Fashion System, first published in 1964 and
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1967 respectively, Barthes’s semiology strays furthest from the realm
of the literary, and into fashion, food, furniture and cars. His central
theoretical preoccupation was, nonetheless, that provided by writing.
At his most structuralist, and at his most influential, during the
late 1960s and early 1970s, Barthes’s work proceeded along three
main lines: first, to the development of a set of highly formal analyses
of the structures of narrative; secondly, to the definition of a quasi-
Formalist notion of literariness; and finally, to the famous announcement
of the death of the author. Barthes’s narratology is striking both for
its manifest scientism, and for its clear indebtedness to themes originally
initiated by Shklovsky and Jakobson. His treatment of literariness is
similarly inspired. Writing and language are not instrumental, Barthes
maintains, but function in their own right and for themselves. Thus,
as Barthes put it in his contribution to a 1966 international symposium
on structuralism, the verb to write is an apparently intransitive verb:
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the writer doesn’t write something, but rather just writes. Despite
the originality of the formulation, there is an obvious parallel between
this stress on the near-intransitivity of writing and Jakobson’s on the
self-consciousness of the poetic function. And, as with Jakobson, so
too with Barthes, this understanding of literariness is necessarily aligned
to an endorsement of modernist, that is, non-realist, aesthetics. Hence
Barthes’s enthusiasm for the attempt by “modern literature…to
substitute the instance of discourse for the instance of reality (or of
the referent), which has been, and still is, a mythical ‘alibi’ dominating
the idea of literature”. For Barthes, as for Jakobson, an apparently
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descriptive aesthetic rapidly acquires prescriptive capacity.
Barthes’s much quoted essay on the death of the author insists that
literary texts be understood in terms of intertextuality rather than of
supposed authorial intentions. The essay itself is very obviously intended
as a polemic against the more traditionally humanist view of the writer
as author (literally, the source) of literary meaning. Formally, Barthes

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