Page 81 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
to in S/Z not only through its content but also through its form:
indeed, it is an emblematic example of the type of text that
continuously skips, meanders, redefines itself and simultaneously
invites the reader to do the same. Here, Barthes develops the
readerly/writerly opposition with a focus on textuality and the
body. The text of pleasure affords a comfortable read and vicar-
ious satisfaction. The text of bliss, conversely, unsettles us
through its formal subversiveness and semantic anarchy and
yields a pleasure akin to orgasm (jouissance). The body of this
transgressive text is not uniform but lacunary. It is riddled with
gaps that stoke our desire to fill them and which concurrently
hold sexual appeal: 'Is not the most erotic portion of the body
where the garment gapes! ... it is intermittence which is erotic'
(Barthes 1990a: 9-10; emphasis in original). Gaps are produced
not only by texts but also by readers, as they allow their pleasure
to 'take the form of a drift' that does not 'respect the whole'
(Barthes 1990a: 18). What readers derive pleasure from is not the
text's 'content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions
[they] impose upon the fine surface' (Barthes 1990a: 12). In
suggesting that the intercourse between readers and texts is erotic,
Barthes also emphasizes that this relationship does not hinge on
proprietorial forms of penetration/possession but rather on play:
on a polymorphous sexuality that defies the regulation of pleasure
according to any rigid rules.
In A Lover's Discourse (1977), Barthes opens up the text's body
by simulating the discourse he examines instead of explaining it
from a detached critical stand point. The discourse of love is
random, incoherent and fragmentary, and Barthes's text is accord-
ingly structured on the basis of fragments which the reader may
recognize and configure into a pattern, yet remain partial and
incomplete. The discourse is always in motion, confirming the
original meaning of discursus: 'the action of running here and
there, comings and goings' (Barthes 1990b: 3). This mobility is
underscored by the collapse of conventional distinctions between
the categories of writer, reader, critic and character. Barthes's
narrator is simultaneously a writer, a critic, a fictional persona,
the reader of other texts and of his own text. Western culture has
endeavoured to discipline the disjointed discourse of love by
turning it into a unified body: the 'love story, subjugated to the
great narrative Other' (Barthes 1990b: 7; emphasis in original).

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