1Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 10D

ROLAND BARTHES “TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF A TALE BY EDGAR ALLAN POE” (1973)

Barthes, Roland. "Textual Analysis of a Tale by Edgar Allan Poe." The Semiotic Challenge.

Trans. Richard Howard. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. 261-293.

Here, Barthes performs a textual analysis of “The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar’ by

Edgar Allan Poe utilising a technique which he develops at greater length with reference to

Sarrasine by Balzac in his S / Z. The basic question which he ponders in this essay is the

following: if literary texts do not express the author’s original ideas nor refer to reality, how

exactly do texts produce meaning? The answer is: just as signs signify by virtue of their

relationship of différance to other signs, so too do texts signify by virtue of their intertextual

relations with other texts. All texts are caught up, like signs, in an incalculably enormous

system of texts (analogous to the signifying system) which is also predicated upon

différance. Like the sign, no text is an island unto itself, each text depending upon the

other texts if it is to have meaning. His goal in painstakingly segmenting this short story is

to demonstrate the complex intertextual process by which we all read without realising it.

There are, Barthes argues, two “major tendencies” (261) in the application of

“semiology, or the science of significations” (261) to the study of literature. Firstly,

“analysis, confronting all the world’s narratives, attempts to establish a narrative model,

obviously a formal one, a structure or grammar of Narrative, from which (once elaborated)

each particular narrative will be analysed in terms of its departures” (261). Secondly, the

narrative is immediately subsumed . . . within the notion of ‘Text,’ space,

process of significations under way, in a word signifying process (signifiance:

a word to which we shall return). . . which is observed not as a finite, closed-

off product, but as a production in the process of being made, ‘grafted’ onto

other texts, other codes (it is the intertextual), articulated thus in terms of

society, of History, not according to determinist paths, but to citational ones.

(261-262)

He calls the second approach “textual analysis” (262) to distinguish it from the “structural

analysis” (172) of narratologists, claiming that while the latter is normally devoted to “oral

narrative (myth)” (262) (he has in mind Lévi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study of Myth”), the

former is applied to “written narrative” (262). Textual analysis

does not attempt to describe the structure of a work; it is not a matter of

recording a structure, but rather of producing a mobile structuration of the

text (a structuration which shifts from reader to reader down through

History), of staying within the signifying volume of the work, within its

signifying process. Textual analysis does not seek to know by what the text is

determined (collected as the final term of a causality), but rather how the text

explodes and scatters. (262)

The reason for this is that the text is “open ad infinitum: no reader, no subject, no science

can exhaust the text” (262). The goal of textual analysis is to “locate and classify without

rigour not all the meanings of the text . . . but the forms, the codes which make meaning

possible. We shall locate the avenues of meaning” (262). The purpose is “not to find the

meaning, nor even a meaning of the text, and our work is not related to literary criticism of

the hermeneutic type (which attempts to interpret the text according to the truth it regards

as hidden within it), as is for instance Marxist or psychoanalytic criticism” (262). The goal

is, rather, “ultimately to conceive, to imagine, to experience the plurality of the text, the

open-endedness of its signifying process” (262).

Barthes proposes to follow a “certain number of operational procedures” (262),

“methodological principles” (263) being the wrong word “insofar as ‘method’ too frequently

postulates a positivistic result” (262). These procedures can be reduced to “four briefly

described accounts” (262):

2Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 10D

1. “We shall segment the text . . . into contiguous and generally very short fragments

(a sentence, a phrase, at most a group of three or four sentences)” (263) which he

terms “lexias” (263). Lexias are “textual signifiers” (263). The “segmentation of the

narrative text into lexias is purely empirical, dictated by a concern for convenience:

the lexia is an arbitrary product, it is simply a segment within which the distribution

of meanings is observed” (263).

2. “For each lexia, we shall observe the meanings generated by it. By meaning, we

obviously understand not the meanings of the word or of the group of words which

the dictionary and grammar, in short the knowledge of our language would account

for adequately. We understand, rather, the connotations of the lexia, the secondary

meanings. These connotations may be associations . . . .; they may be relations,

resulting from the juxtaposition of two sometimes quite diverse places in the text”

(264). “Our lexias will be . . . the finest possible sieves, by which we shall skim off

the meanings, the connotations” (264).

3. “Our analysis will be gradual: we shall proceed step by step through the text. . . .

We shall not construct a map of the text, and we shall not be tracing its thematics”

(264). What we will do, he argues, is “unfold the text, the layering of the text” (264)

(that is, the unfolding of layers of meanings along the paradigmatic axis), to produce

a“reading . . . filmed in slow-motion” (264) (as the reader proceeds along the

syntagmatic axis of the text).

4. We “shall not be unduly concerned if . . . we ‘forget’ some meanings” (264). “Our

aim is not to find the meaning, nor even a meaning of the text. . . . Our aim is to

manage to conceive, to imagine, to live the plurality of the text, the opening of its

signifying process” (173). Our goal is to show “departures of meaning, not arrivals”

(265) precisely because what “founds the text is not an internal, closed, accountable

structure, but the outlet of the text onto other texts, other signs, what makes the

text is the intertextual” (265), what he terms elsewhere its “combinational infinity”

(265).

Because intertextuality is more important than the Author, Barthes argues, in the analysis

“we shall not speak of the author, Edgar Poe, nor of the literary history of which he is part”

(265).

After devoting pp. 266 - 288 to the actual textual analysis of the short story, Barthes

offers a final section devoted to ‘methodological conclusions.’ We have, he writes, “simply

tried to grasp the narrative as it was being constructed” (288). There was no question of

“producing ‘the’ structure of Poe’s tale, still less that of all narratives, but only of returning,

in a freer, less attached way, to the gradual unfolding of the text” (288). He defines codes

as “associative fields, a supra-textual organization of notations which impose a certain

notion of structure” (288). All codes are “essentially cultural: the codes are certain types of

already seen, of already read, of already done: the code is the form this already takes,

constitutive of the writing of the world” (288). He refers to it, accordingly, as the “cultural

code: this is the code of knowledge, or rather of human knowledge, of public opinion, of

culture as it is transmitted by the book, by teaching and, more generally, by the whole of

sociality” (288-289). This code “has for its reference knowledge as the body of rules

elaborated by society” (289). There are “several subcodes of the general cultural code”

(289): the scientific code; the “rhetorical code, which collects all the social rules of

speaking” (289); the “chronological code” (289) (“assigning a date, which seems to us quite

natural . . . is in fact a very cultural practice” [289]); the “socio-historical code” (289), that

is, “all the infused knowledge we have of our time, of our society, of our country” (289); the

“code of communication” (289) (any relation which, in the text, is uttered in the form of

address . . . or as exchange” [289-290]); the “code of actions” (290) (what he calls

elsewhere the ‘proairetic’) which “sustains the anecdotal armature of the actions, or the

utterances which denotes them” (290) and which are “organised into sequences” (290): the

3Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 10D

terms of the actional sequence are linked together among themselves . . . by

an appearance of logic . . . which proceeds not from the laws of formal

reasoning but from our habits of reasoning, of observing: it is an endoxal,

cultural logic (it appears ‘logical’ to us that a severe diagnosis should follow

the determination ‘bad health’); further, this logic is identified with

chronology: what comes after seems to us caused by. Temporality and

causality . . . seem to us to establish a sort of naturalness, of intelligibility, of

anecdotal legibility. . . . (290-291)

Last but not least, there is the “code of the enigma” (291) (the synonym for which is the

“hermeneutic” [291] code) which “collects the terms by whose linkage . . . we posit an

enigma, and after a few ‘delays’ which constitute the very spice of the narrative, the

solution is disclosed” (291).

Barthes argues that the codes are “merely deja-lu departures, initiations of

intertextuality: the frayed character of the codes is not what contradicts structure . . . but is

on the contrary . . . an integral part of structuration. It is this fraying of the text which

distinguishes structure – object of structural analysis proper – from structuration – object of

the textual analysis we have attempted to perform here” (292). In S / Z he mentions at

least two other codes: the semic (this concerns the connotations often evoked in

characterisation or description) and the symbolic (this concerns the main binary oppositions

by which humans ‘cut up’ the real such as father versus son, woman versus man, life versus

death, good versus evil, black versus white, etc.).

Barthes argues that the “textile metaphor” (292) used here is not accidental: textual

analysis “needs to represent the text as a tissue (moreover this is its etymological

meaning), as a braid of different voices, of many codes, at once interlaced and incomplete.

A narrative is not a tabular space, a plane structure, it is a volume, a stereophony” (292).

He insists that “meaning’s mode of presence (except perhaps for the actional sequences) is

not a development, but an explosion: calls for contact and communication, positing of

contracts, exchanges, outbursts of references, gleams of knowledge, dimmer, more

penetrating impulses from the ‘other scene’” (292). These ‘sideway glances’ are combined

with a forward momentum:

All this ‘volume’ is drawn forward (toward the end of the narrative), thereby

provoking an impatience of reading, under the effect of two structural

arrangements: a) distortion: the terms of a sequence or code are separated,

braided with heterogeneous elements; a sequence seems to be abandoned . .

., but it is continued later on, sometimes much later on; there is the creation

of an expectation; we can even, now, define the sequence: that floating

microstructure which constructs not a logical object but an expectation and its

resolution; b) irreversibility: despite the floating character of structuration, in

the classical, readerly narrative (such as Poe’s tale), there are two codes

which maintain a vectorised order, the actional code (based on a logico-

temporal order) and the code of the Enigma (the question is crowned by its

solution). (293)

Modern “avant-garde” (293) writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet seek to “render the text

thoroughly reversible, to expel the logico-temporal residue, to attack empiricism (logic of

behaviour, actional code) and truth (code of the Enigma)” (293).

Barthes concludes by pointing out that “we must not exaggerate the distance

separating the modern text from the classical narrative” (293) because even in works such

as Poe’s “one and the same sentence frequently refers to two simultaneous codes, without

our being able to choose which one is ‘true’” (293). The

characteristic of narrative, once it achieves the quality of a text, is to

constrain us to the undecidability of the codes. In whose name might we

decide? In the author’s? But the narrative gives us only a speaker, a

4Richard L. W. Clarke LITS3304 Notes 10D

performer who is caught up in his own production. Of this school of criticism,

or that? All are challengeable, swept away by history. . . Undecidability is

not a weakness, but a structural condition of narration: there is no univocal

determination of the utterance: in a statement, several codes, several voices

are there, without preeminence. Writing is precisely that loss of origin, that

loss of ‘motives’ to the gain of a volume of indeterminations (or of

overdeterminations): this volume is precisely the signifying process. Writing

occurs . . . from the moment when we can no longer identify who is speaking

and when we can establish only that speaking has begun.

Barthes’s point in all this is that we understand the meaning of each text by relating it,

segment by segment as we read, to bits and pieces of the other texts (texts of all kinds and

not just literary texts) which we have internalised and absorbed into our consciousness.

Even if we are illiterate and unable to read, we ceaselessly ingest all kinds of oral utterances

which then form our consciousness in the same way that written texts do. For most

persons, consciousness is formed out of a mixture of oral and written utterances. Barthes’s

argument, you might recall, is that the Author should not be privileged in literary criticism in

the way that he has traditionally been because the so-called Author has little agency and is

little more than a ‘scriptor,’ more scripted than scripting. Language is not a vehicle or

instrument which people use: it is, rather, the other way around. Langue speaks or writes

itself through people, in the Derridean schema, the author’s hand being cut off from his

intention and will. Texts, from this point of view, almost write themselves as scriptors

merely regurgitate a zillion texts absorbed consciously or unconsciously.