Page 80 - Critical and Cultural Theory

TEXTUALITY

picking up a little girl and hugging her. The second style is
.
romantic, it turns the scene into a painted tableau: .. night is
a woman in a white evening gown clasping a bronze statue in
her arms. Here life receives the guarantee of Art. .. The third
.
style of the experienced scene is mockery; the woman is caught
in an amusing attitude, or better still, a comic one; her pose,
her expression are excessive, caricatural.
(Barthes 1990c: 302)

Barthes also stresses that there are affinities between the promo-
tion of fashionable products and the realist mode: both capitalize
on texts designed to make the implausible seem probable through
their obsessive insistence on details.
S/Z (1970) is often regarded as the culmination of Barthes's
experiment with structuralist techniques. In this work, Barthes
analyses Balzac's short story 'Sarrasine' by dissecting it into 561
lexias, or units of reading, and by devising five codes. The herme-
neutic code refers to the strategies through which the story sets up
certain enigmas and varyingly resolves or complicates them. The
code of signifiers refers to the ways in which important clues can
be gleaned from apparently insignificant words or bits of words.
The symbolic code refers to recurring patterns in the text. The
proairetic code refers to the actions presented in the text. The
cultural code, finally, refers to the accepted body of knowledge or
opinion against which the story is told. This complex decoding
method may justify an interpretation of S/Z as a fundamentally
structuralist project. However, Barthes's handling of structural
analysis also points to a radical departure from Structuralism.
This is made evident by his use of a linear (rather than spatial)
style of textual interpretation. While Structuralism was keen on
isolating the text's main components and reorganizing them into
a map or diagram able to reveal central relationships and opposi-
tions, Barthes's reading of 'Sarrasine' along the line of writing
refuses to arrest the flow of the narrative. The adoption of a
linear reading allows the text to work on its readers and to
modify their expectations and interpretations through shifts, gaps
and changes of direction - the way in which Barthes reads
Balzac's text typifies the process of reading as open and discontin-
uous (Barthes 1975).
The Pleasure of the Text (1975) develops the approach alluded

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