Page 79 - Decoding Culture

72 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

reading of Saussure as well as drawing upon subsequent work in
linguistics and elsewhere, work by the likes of Hjelmslev,
Jakobson, Lacan, and Levi-Strauss himself. Indeed, Barthes' revi­
sionism goes so far as to claim that Saussure may have been
mistaken in viewing linguistics as but one application of the general
science of semiology; instead Barthes proposes that semiology
should be understood as a part of linguistics. But however tenable
that inversion may seem - and it hangs upon an assumption about
the pervasiveness of ordinary language and the concomitant need
for a 'trans-linguistics' - Barthes, at this stage at least, remains
committed to the classical semiological project. The aim of semio­
logical research,' he writes, 'is to reconstitute the functioning of the
systems of significations other than language in accordance with
the process typical of any structuralist activity, which is to build a
simulacrum of the object u n der observation' (Barthes, 1973: 95).
Accordingly, when in 1966 he comes to examine narrative
(Barthes, 1977b), it is with a view to modelling the langue of nar­
rativity from which specific narratives may be generated.
His work on narrative, along with that of other French 'narra­
tologists' such as Bremond, Genette, Greimas and Todorov, was
crucial in stimulating a growing interest in the subject within cul­
tural studies. Narratives, after all, are ubiquitous in modern
cultures, so to uncover a langue of narrativity would indeed be a
major achievement. Later, and with characteristic iconoclasm,
Barthes would mock the somewhat grandiose scientific ambitions
of these early semiological projects, but at the time it was precisely
that aspiration which made the semiology of narrative so appeal­
ing. The very formalism of narrative analysis (an approach derived
also from the work of the Russian Formalists) made it seem scien­
tifically credible and gave impetus to the kind of detailed
examination of narrative conventions which thus far had not char­
acterized Anglo-American perspectives on culture. Just by making

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