THE DIALECTICS OF STYLE: INSIGHTS FROM THE SEMIOLOGY OF ROLAND BARTHES

Author(s): Roland A. Champagne

Source: Style , Summer 1979, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer 1979), pp. 279-291
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/42945251

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 Roland A. Champagne

THE DIALECTICS OF STYLE:

INSIGHTS FROM THE SEMIOLOGY OF ROLAND BARTHES

Style has been studied as a lin

guistic problem by Roland Barthes since his Le Degre Zero de l'Ecriture in
1953. His theories of the linguistic context of style have given his critical
practice an orientation that focuses upon the innate tensions of literary
creativity. Now it may be possible to respond positively to Josue7 Harari's
question of whether it is possible to encompass both the literary criticism and
the critical theory of Barthes in one sweeping overview.1 Barthes himself once
identified his method as "semiological" ( Elements de Semiologie 1965), that is,
presupposing linguistics as the skeleton for all signifying systems. This means
that the tensions within the language of texts provide a dialectical meeting
that generates the creativity of each text. He has explored the disparity
between the now well-known Saussurian distinctions of langue (the language
of a given community) and parole (the individual's performance of a given
language) in order to portray the constituent roles played by these two
components in any given text or signifying system. These roles imply certain
rules that govern the dialectical meeting of the individual and the community
within various cultural identities. Hence, there is a tension operating within
language that is waiting to be discovered by a semiology concerned with how
langue and parole combine to form signifying systems.
The challenge for semiology has been specifically formulated by Barthes to
respond to the following question: "what are the articulations, the displace-
ments, which make up the mythological tissue of a mass consumer society?"2
The nature of that "mythological tissue" is the historical problem of how
langue and parole have been intertwined to consitute such signifying systems
as literary genres. The word "mythological" has the peculiarly Barthesian
meaning of "unconsciously blinding" while "tissue" implies a certain texture
which can be analyzed and identified. As Barthes himself has noted,
semiology is in the same position as psychoanalysis once was in its concern
with literary style. Both disciplines, having established their lexicon, must
identify the "syntactical order"3 of their subjects. This "order" in semiology
has been implemented by Barthes himself through his development of the
interaction between langue and parole in all signifying systems. This order is
also a historical problem because the linguistic community (langue) pre-
determines the choices of a given speaker or writer to create an individual
idiolect (parole). And it is the historical dialectic produced by the meeting of
these two that results in the development of cultural identity. Let us then
examine the components of this Barthesian dialectic in order to realize the

STYLE : Vol . XIII, Summer 1979 , No. 3 279

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 280 ROLAND A. CHAMPAGNE

parameters of the semiological analysis of style.

Barthes acknowledges the role of langue in his own work. Referring to how
he wrote his S/Z(1970), he notes that "...it is not me who wrote S/Z: it was us,
that is, all those whom I explicitly or unconsciously cited and named, who have
become in fact 'readings' and not 'authors.' "4 This insight reveals the presence
of langue as the linguistic community's heritage within Barthes as an
individual speaker. The linguistic community is not composed of people, but
rather of the components of a speaker's discourse which are other than himself.
If these components are merely features associated with form, Barthes directs
semiology toward a mere study of langue because he once identified its charge
thus: "Semiology is a science of forms since it studies significations
independent of their content."5 However, form is only part of langue' s role in
the larger context of semiosis, that is, all signifying activity rather than merely
that which has to do with words. There is also the linguistic community's
judgment as to the possibilities acceptable within the content of a given speech
act. In his Critique et veritey (1966), Barthes isolated such a judgment as the
notion of "verisimilitude [which] corresponds. . . to what the public believes is
possible and which can be very different from the historically real or the
scientifically possible."6 Hence, langue entails a conditioning of the speech act
in both its form and its content.
In the Vlth section of the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Roland Barthes
was involved in the sociological study of literary texts. And indeed, the
investigation of langue appears to be appropriate to the Marxist position of a
sociological role for literary analysis. In his essay "History or Literature?" ( Sur
Racine, 1963), Barthes offered the rallying cry for continued analyses of the
role of langue with the words: "amputate literature from the individual."7
Instead of being concerned with the individual author, sociological analysis
would present literary history in light of social institutions and political
activities. One of the most awesome of such institutions is the French literary
establishment which has created a canon of French "literature." This canon is
also part of the presence of langue for the speaker. John Sturrock sees the
plight of Roland Barthes and ecriture as challenging the very existence of this
literary establishment:

Barthes' quarrel, in fact, is with the literary myth of France,

whereby admission to the canon is granted only to those works
considered to have measured up to a timeless ideal. But the ideal is
not timeless, it is biased and historical. French literary history is
incomplete, since it outlaws what it cannot classify on its own
terms.8

Hence, Barthes has sought to analyze the "literary myth of France" by offering
to appreciate texts that do have worth despite their rejection from the canon of
traditional "literature."
Barthes has also revealed that there is a certain amount of intellectual and
epistemological determinism inherent to every language. Within the French
language, for example, the necessity of attributing masculine or feminine

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 ROLAND BARTH ES 281

gender to nouns and pronouns often predisposes attributing sexual traits to

certain neutral words. And every language has similar limitations or manners
of expression, as Barthes has noted:

Every language entails obligatory rubrics: not only does la langue ,

by its structure, preclude one from saying certain things for which
no grammatical expression exists to articulate but also la langue
obligates one positively to articulate other things.9

Because of this awareness, he constantly seeks to expand epistemology and

intellectual cognition by investigating many languages and cultures wherein
the structure (e.g. the script of Greek, Japanese, and Chinese) conditions
thinking in ways distinctly different from the French. With literary texts, he
also explores the non-literal meanings which are not at all obvious to what is
determined by the structure of the language. His readings often reflect a
concern with the connotative (rather than denotative) and symbolic (rather
than literal) manners in which texts are organized. By doing so, he seeks to
demonstrate that there is a certain playfulness within texts in that the social
determinism of langue cannot completely explain away signifying activity.
This playfulness leads to a tension in texts between langue and another more
creative and independent factor that allows the text's necessary symbolic
structure. Within the symbolic structure of the text, the unconscious reigns so
that a different historical sense operates "which does not possess the same
temporal logic"10 as the historicity of the writer's linguistic community.
Instead an unconscious ordering of the words reflects the individuality of the
speech act. And this is the arena of the second component in the dialectic of
semiosis - parole.
Within the parole , of which a literary text is an example, one can find a
testament to the activity of semiosis because therein lies the confrontation of
the individual artist with the signs of his linguistic community (i.e. the langue ).
This testament must be understood as a semiological document by the
sensitive reader who, like Barthes himself, realizes that the writer has had to
fabricate the reading from a host of possible signs within a given linguistic
community. As Gerard Genette has remarked, Barthes points out to readers
that "man fabricates a bit too many signs, and these signs are not always
healthy signs."11 In other words, there are etiological factors revealed within
the symbolic structure of written texts. The sickness is the one caused by the
formation of an idiolect from a given sociolect which Barthes identified as
"woven with habits and repetitions, with sterotypes, obligatory final clauses
and key words."12 The degree to which an individual speaker can distinguish
himself from the sociolect also indicates the degree of creativity or originality
which exists in a given text. For example, in his Sade Fourier Loyola , Barthes
notes his interest in those three writers because of the uniqueness of their
idiolects:

Social intervention (which does not necessarily occur when the text
is published) is not measured by a text's popularity nor by the

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 282 ROLAND A . CHAMPAGNE

faithfulness of a text's socio

nor projected for certain avid sociologists to find it therein, but
instead by the violence which permits a text to exceed the laws
which a society, ideology and philosophy give themselves in order
to make themselves congruent to a fine historically intelligible
movement. Such an excess has a name: ecriture ,13

This excess- later isolated by Barthes in the texts of Sade, Fourier, and
Loyola- gives individual identity to each text. And the purpose of semiology is
then to dislocate that individuality from its social heritage in order to identify
the mythological determinism of langue as well as the creative thrust of parole.
Barthes views the task of critical discourse as functioning to dislocate the
text and unlock its components. The descriptive enterprise of the critic is thus
not a mimetic nor a reproductive one based on the primary text. Instead, it must
be acknowledged that dislocation is innate to "describing, which is not only
being inexact or incomplete but also changing structure and signifying
something other than what is demonstrated [in the primary text]."14 In his
rebuttal of Picard's attack, Barthes appropriately modified a cliche'in order to
convey this notion by saying that "the work proposes, man disposes."15 This
"disposition" is the portrayal of the difference between langue and parole ,
especially as it has been reflected in texts written since 1850 in France. In such
texts, Barthes maintains that the writers reveal their new status regarding
their role within their societies. Instead of being "witnesses to universal
truth"16 as they had been prior to 1850 in France, French writers began to
become unhappy consciences insofar as they began to reject the dominant
ideologies reflected in the langue. Likewise, the texts of writers like Flaubert
and Baudelaire must be described as operating against the "mythical
discourse" of dominant ideology thus:

the heavily laden languages (such as mythical discourse) could be

trapped in the threading together of a meta-writing in which the
'text' (which we still call literary), the antidote to myth, would
become the pole, or even better the fresh, light, extended, open,
decentralized, noble, and free area wherein ecriture is deployed
against the notion of idiom, that is, within its limits in order to
combat it.17

This internal conflict is what the literary critic seeks to expose with descriptive
writing.
The conflict between parole and langue is signalled by an interrupted and
fragmentary text. The interruptions or fragments are distinctions from an
assumed extension with the social idiom. The fragment is thus an indicator for
Barthes that something profound is happening in a text because, as he noted,
"in a divided society, even if he manages to unify his own languages, each man
has to struggle against the fragmentation of what he hears ."18 Such a struggle
bears witness to the paradoxical situation of parole and langue in any given

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 ROLAND BARTHES 283

text. On the one hand, there is a playfulness in their relationship because

parole finds its orgins in langue and then seeks an identity from it. Barthes
portrays Sade as exemplifying this situation in that, while Sade was impris-
oned by his contemporaries in the Bastille, he expressed his freedom to live
there through his writings.19 Sade was at once imprisoned and free in his
language. On the other hand, a great text bears witness to the rules of the
tension between langue and parole. Those rules exist because, as Barthes
himself pointed out, "it is the very rhythm of what we read and what we don't
read... which constitutes the pleasure of the great narratives."20 Such a rhythm
is an indication that there is also a system, as well as a certain freedom, that
governs the relationship of langue and parole. Let us then examine the
possibilities of a signifying system existing between the langue and parole of a
text.
The apparent conflicts between langue and parole create the linguistic
dialectic necessary for the ensemble of any given text. However, Jonathan
Culler's reservation must be acknowledged: "the linguistic model, properly
applied may indicate how to proceed, but it can do little more than that."21
Semiology has introduced the terms code and message which can be helpful in
going beyond the necessary paradox of langue/ parole in a literary text. The
specific qualities of code and message are appropriate because they allow one
to account for the supra-linguistic properties that condition the language of a
text. While code is akin to the langue in that it is representative of a given
community, the notion of code expands the community into a cultural network
of signs so that Barthes presents an intertextual meaning of a code as a
"perspective of quotations and a mirage of structures."22 A whole cultural
ensemble arrives with a code. For example, a culture's literary heritage and its
generic parameters do channel the way in which texts are written and read by
informed members of that culture. And the message is a more complicated term
than parole because the message must also account for the reader/text
confrontation. In light of this view of message, Barthes understands reading to
entail "expanding [e'toiler] upon the text rather than gathering it
together."23 Hence, the science which Barthes proposed as the future for
semiology, "arthrology"- the science of components,24 has to deal with the
interweaving of code and message in the system of a text.
The Barthesian description of texts has produced many variations on the
system of texts. His presentation of literary "codes" is especially helpful to
understand the system underlying individual style. A code is a unit of meaning
that is more expansive than a thematic series because a code can include
several themes that do not have a linear, logically cohesive bond. A critic is a
privileged reader who can reveal such codes by discovering the very fabric of
an individual text. S/Z by Barthes discovered five codes in Balzac's Sarrasine
while Barthes' interrogation of the Biblical text Acts X-XI provided twelve
twelve separate codes.25 Apparently, these efforts were part of what he has
himself called "a sort of scientific delirium with semiology."26 His hopes for a
scientific study of narrative have apparently been tempered by an awareness
that certain ties between code and message could not be scientifically verified
by all readers. Instead, it is the functioning of the various codes within a given

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 284 ROLAND A. CHAMPAGNE

message which has become the object of the developing Barthesian semiology.
In Critique et ve'rité ' Barthes noticed that linguistics had to be supplemented
by other disciplines in order to account for the plural system of a text: "it
[linguistics] will especially need history, which will indicate the often lengthy
duration of secondary codes (such as the rhetorical code), and anthropology
(which will allow it to describe comparatively and by successive integrations,
the logic of signifiers)."27 In order to explore how a message can implement
such an internal "logic of signifiers," Barthes has condoned and encouraged
the avant-garde writings of the Tel Quel Group and of others who produce texts
that defy linguistic analysis (e.g. Sollers' Nombres; Roche's Mecriť) in the
conventional manner. These efforts appear to be developments of a challenge
launched by Barthes in his Sur Racine that in order to understand "the
coherence of the signifying system, we must extend every work and accept the
adventure of a holistic criticism.28
The purpose of a "holistic criticism" is a tall order in order to appreciate the
ensemble of langue/ parole and code/message. Nevertheless, Barthes has
insisted that such is the role of semiological work: "We can give the impression
of being unrelated to contingent history and of soaring outside of time, but in
fact we have already begun the battle to implement a fission within the
Western symbol."29 His interest in Oriental cultures (Japan, China) is
generated by the need to establish a context for Western civilization's unity of
langue/parole in language and message/code in semiosis. For example, the
Chinese ideograms combine different elements by including the presence of the
inscriber's body in the graphic picture as well as the tension of his struggle
with that language all in a single figure.30 Hence, Barthes began to realize,
from the more obvious Chinese example, that writing is also an attempt by a
writer to make his body perpetual in time. And Barthes would have all readers
acknowledge that semiosis entails a plural mingling of components focused in
a single gaze: "a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures
and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestations, but there
is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader..."31
Some of Barthes' critics have been miffed by his apparent lack of
developing "the full applicability of the rules that govern the grammar of that
system."32 And indeed Barthes is lacking here. It is for his readers to do this
developing. For example, Michael Riffaterre in his Semiotics of Poetry (1978)
does develop such a plan for explaining the apparent ungrammaticality of
many Surrealist poems. However, Barthes himself leaves us with an awareness
of the importance of the fragment in semiosis. In his Roland Barthes , his
reflections are a commentary on his own writing style as he addresses himself
to the question of "what is the meaning of a pure series of interruptions."
Individually, a fragment has its own internal coherence:

the fragment has its ideal; a high condensation not of thought, or of

wisdom, or of truth (as in the Maxim), but of music; 'development'
should be countered by 'tone' something articulated and sung, a
diction; here it is timbre which should reign.33

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 ROLAND BARTHES 285

The "pure series" of such fragments leads to a signifying system which is

organically united by a rhythm unique to each confrontation of text and
reader. Barthes has specifically mapped out the role of displacement as the
rhythm within the "reality of the unconscious" from which and to which
literature refers. In his literary studies, Barthes often theorizes and expands
upon texts without giving specific sources for the basic texts. This stylistic
feature, which Michel Butor understood to be "the essential distinction" of
Systeme de la Mode** demonstrates a need for a culture to be different and
distinct. Likewise, certain literary texts appear to be wholly marginal to the
culture in which they occur. Barthes presented the texts of Sade in such a way.
Sade was an example of the pornographer who violently displaced others from
him because "he literally wrote debauchery and imposed his own solitude, thus
refusing the cordiality, the complicity, the solidarity, the equality, and all the
morality of human relationships, that is, hysteria. ":íň A reality is thus
implemented by differentiation from another already recognized as existing.
Morality and hysteria are substitute principles in Sade's morality which is
implemented by hysterical acclamation of a specific social group. In lieu of
social hysteria, Sade then offers the personal hysteria of "libidinal practice
[which] is for Sade a real text."36 Hence, a substitute reality can be implemented
by some writers in reaction to the reality of a historical moment that is not
viable within that culture. Sade cannot be understood by a literary history
which seeks to progressively discover a historical moment to which he is
reacting. Barthes said it well when he said that "Sade is begging for a counter
strip-tease"37 because the strip-tease represents the ability to progressively
uncover truth. Some writers may be presenting historical truth as unfolding
before the reader's eyes rather than buried beneath the origins of the text. The
operation of displacement is well-described by the literary fragment that recurs
throughout the Barthes writings. Rather than to speak of developed and
integrated words in literary works, Barthes often speaks of the alternation of
fragments (e.g. his Fragments d'un discours amoureux) which appear not to be
part of a continued discussion. In his Roland Barthes , he speaks of the reality
of literary fragments as the constituent parts of a work:

Then if you put the fragments one after the next, is no organization
possible? Yes: the fragment is like the musical idea of a song cycle
{La Bonne Chanson , Dichterliebe ): each piece is self-sufficient, and
yet it is never anything but the interstice of its neighbors: the work
consists of no more than an inset, an hors-texte.38

Nevertheless, Barthes also realizes that some texts draw their power from
their similarity to a given linguistic or semiotic community. Through the
demonstration of the other principle of the dialectic of the unconscious -
condensation, Barthes creates a case for relating and tying a work to the
factors which condition it. His Elements de semiologie discussed the many
binary distinctions which structural linguistics learned from the Prague
School (e.g. Trubetzkoy's + and - categories) and which helped to isolate and
analyze the components of language. Likewise, in the literary text, the

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 286 ROLAND A . CHAMPAGNE

techniques of binary distinctions are useful in relating or distinguishing the

structure of the text from other components of the real. Jacques Lacan's
postulate of a mirror-stage39 in the development of the ego is basic to this
unconscious dualism within the text because the human psyche is thereby
constructed on the basis of the recognition of a mirror image of the self in
another. The opposition of self/Other is perpetuated by metaphors that con-
stantly attempt to link identified concepts to those that are distinct yet retain
some recognizably similar feature. By contrast, the use of metonymy, which
substitutes one word for another, implements a principle of contradistinction
by which an identity can be established by refusing a known other. Never-
theless, the limitations of condensation and displacement must also be
acknowledged because their overuse can reduce the real into mere binary
identities. Sometimes, it seems that contemporary French thought is trapped
by such a binary system of symmetry so characteristic of Barthes' thought and
so rampant as to deserve Anthony Wilden's judgment as "the paranoia of
symmetry."40 Such symmetry is not satisfactory in itself because it distorts the
real into paradigms which are too neat.
Barthes directs stylistics into an appreciation of the intersection of the
words with the unconscious. Culture and individual desire intersect so that a
writer's and a reader's desires have a very real presence within culture.
Reading imposes an order upon a text which is formed by a cultural event. But
no appreciation of the cultural event or the text can occur without the desire
implemented by a specific reading. A problem occurs with what Lacan calls the
''failure of the paternal metaphor"41 to maintain control over the psyche. What
this means is that oftentimes a person must repudiate the father in order to
sustain his or her own identity. By doing so, a whole system of origins and
secure values are rejected. The effect on language is to deny the existence of the
signified, that is, recoverable meaning. Within a literary text, the linguistic or
semiotic community's judgment of a given text may ultimately be rejected and
reordered by the desire of a given reading. Michel Foucault42 has pointed out
that this individual flight of fancy is understood as madness because a culture
cannot long endure the rejection of its values. Nevertheless, it is that very
madness of the absence of the symbolic values in a given culture that allows a
reading to follow texts according to a logic innate to those texts.43 Meaning is
thus created by the odyssey of the reading through the text. Such an odyssey
links various parts of texts to one another during the reader's passage. Roland
Barthes regards this activity as the creation of "correlative meaning"44
because order is organized at the very moment of reading as a result of a
dialectical meeting of the text and the unconscious.
The critical practice of Roland Barthes often accounts for a primordial
sense of loss within literary works. In his preface to Chateaubriand's La Vie de
Rance, he noted that in this story by an elderly man to a generation obsessed by
its youth the commentary was upon Chateaubriand's own inability to
completely communicate his vision because "old age is for Chateaubriand
closely tied to the idea of work."45 As Chateaubriand constantly worked to
approximate total communication, that writer was also aware that he was
losing the energy of his youth. Recuperation of that loss is impossible. Hence,

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 ROLAND BARTHES 287

rather than a writer

of that writer in pur
For Barthes, it is the reader who participates in the writer's desire to
complete a given literary message. That participation, exemplified by the
literary criticism of Roland Barthes, is similar to the transfer that occurs
between psychoanalyst and patient. Events within a patient's past create a
history whereby the analyst intervenes in a patient's imaginary constructs. A
literary reader also focuses upon certain key events in the past in order to enter
into a text and to attempt to relate that text to a world of meaning. Those
exchanges of analyst-patient and reader-writer have been duplicated within
the seminars of both Lacan and Barthes at the Colle'ge de France and the Ecole
des Hautes Études. Their seminars are the primary media for the theoretical
development of their musings on the relationships between psychoanalysis
and literature. Barthes once observed that the time-honored exchange called
"transference" occurs at unexpected points within a seminar: "It must be said
that I have learned from listening to the discomfort of groups which were much
too large wherein everyone was complaining about not knowing anyone: the
famous teaching rapport is not the rapport between teacher and student, but it
is the rapport of students to one another."46 This pedagogical insight reveals a
fundamental basis for much communication: that there be the desire to
communicate or receive a message. In the Barthes seminar, his students share
the common desire to learn from him, which was quite distinct from Barthes'
own desire to communicate to his students. A certain lack precedes Barthes'
desire and inspires that desire which drives his speech. His students likewise
yearn to fill a void which they expect his speech to satisfy. Their learning
becomes a product of their own desires and the desires of Barthes. At the
intersection of those desires, an experience occurs whereby the activities of
various parties can be related for a few moments in order to exchange
information.
As a result, literary criticism is not so much the confrontation of one person
with another, a reader with a writer, as it is the intermingling of desires.
Barthes isolated this experience in Le Plaisir du texte when he remarked thus:
"It is not the 'person' of the author which I need, it is the space: the possibility of
a dialectic of desire and of an unexpected climax so that the games might not be
finished, so that there may be a game."47 Barthes alludes to Sartre here ("so
that the games might not be finished"- "que les jeux ne soient pas faits") in
order to refute the social determinism of a literary text in favor of a
psychological openness which precludes ever "foreclosing" (sic Lacan) a
literary text through a stylistics which may aspire to "scientifically' explain
away the factors involved in writing or reading that text. Language, especially
in its literary form, invokes the literal meaning of desire as words take the
human psyche on an adventure. In an interview about his own writing,
Barthes once revealed a curious affinity between language and desire for him:

The poetry [of my writing] which you mention is without doubt only
the pleasure of writing, itself a guardian of the pleasure of reading. I
am certain that it is toward this pleasure that we must head, but the

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 288 ROLAND A. CHAMPAGNE

very status of a responsible intellectual, professor, or essayist

constantly steers us away: the pleasure of a text is slowly,
sometimes painfully, attained. If you write a study about intel-
lectuals, one day you will have to account for these adventures of
desire.48

Nevertheless, Barthes' own account of his desire is not necessarily the

adventure of desire in his texts. He implies in this passage a necessary link
between the "pleasure of writing" and the "pleasure of reading." Yet there are
many times when the pleasure of his own style for himself may not affect
others such that their own desires in reading will be touched. The intersection
of reading and writing desires is not one that can be simply controlled by the
writer.
The desire of articulation in order to fill the void of an anxiety-ridden lack is
common for both writers and readers. In some cases, what the writer has
articulated through a specific style appeals to a reader who recognizes the void
filled by that given style. At one point in his analysis of Sarrasine , Barthes
recognized that he was fulfilling the roles of writer and reader in S/Z, as he
observed that "reading is finding meaning and finding meaning is naming."49
Hence, the desire to read also entails the desire to create one's own meaning
and the desire to articulate. Similarly, the writer has desires to find meaning
and to articulate that meaning through a written style. In contradistinction,
writers and readers may have similar desires which perform in a parallel
fashion without even engaging one another.
At times, however, the desires of writing and reading do intersect. The
experience is analagous to one isolated by Barthes about the operatic voice. He
once remarked that "the 'granular quality' of a voice... implies a special erotic
relationship between the voice and the listener."50 That operatic voice attains a
special pitch in order to convey an erotic relationship to its listener. And it is
the listener who likewise must recognize that there is a physical bond of desire
being shared. And indeed, the erotic ties of desire shared by the reader and
writer of a literary text are established when both share a common point of
interest. The pleasure, even the climax, of those intersecting desires is a call for
a new type of stylistics that can recognize the erotic nature of the ties between
language and desire.
Semiological description, especially as practiced by Roland Barthes, leads
to an awareness of the dialectic of all language. While langue and the codes
provide a certain mechanistic material to communicating activity related
together by the unconscious role of condensation, parole and the message give
semiosis a playfulness that adds a dynamic, slippery element implemented by
the unconscious role of displacement. The combination of these elements leads
to the work of literary dialectics not only within the text, but as Michael
Riffaterre has demonstrated, "the literary phenomenon is a dialectic between
text and reader."51 And Roland Barthes proves by his theories and critical
practice that such a dialectical involvement creates the bond of style that
unites writer, literary text, and reader.

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 ROLAND BARTHES 289

NOTES

^osue V. Harari, "The Maximum Narrative, An Introduction to Barthes' Recent

Criticism," Style, VIII, No. 1 (Winter 1974), 71.

2Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill &
Wang, 1977), p. 167.

' Ibid

4Roland Barthes, "Responses," Tel Quel, No. 47 (Autumn 1971), p. 102. My

translation to this and other French references in this study unless I indicate another
translator.

'Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Le Seuil, 1957), p. 218.

"Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), p. 15.

7Roland Barthes, Sur Racine (Paris: Le Seuil, 1963), p. 156.

"John Sturrock, "Roland Barthes, "The New Review, I, 2 (May 1974), 15.

9Roland Barthes, Alors la Chine? (Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur, 1975), p. 13.

10Roland Barthes, in L'Express va plus loin..., no ed. (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1973), p.
158.

llGerard Genette, "L'Envers des signes," in his Figures (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), p. 196.

12 Image Music Text, p. 168.

1 'Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola (Paris: Le Seuil, 1971), p. 16.

14Roland Barthes, "Le Message photographique," Communications, No. 1 (1961), p.

129.

15Roland Barthes, Critique et vérité ' (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), p. 52.

16Roland Barthes, Le Degre' zéro d l'écriture (Paris: Gonthier reprint, 1969), p. 10.

17Roland Barthes, "Changer l'objet lui-même," L'Esprit , XXXIX, No. 402 (April
1971), 616.

1HRoland Barthes, "Languages at War in a Culture of Peace," The (London)7ïraes

Literary Supplement, No. 3632 (8 October 1971), pp. 1203-04.

19Sade Fourier Loyola , p. 42.

20Roland Barthes, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Le Seuil, 1973), pp. 21-22.

21 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp.
265.

22Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Le Seuil, 1970), p. 27.

23 Ibid., p. 20.

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 290 ROLAND A. CHAMPAGNE

/ , ,
24Roland Barthes, Elements

25Roland Barthes, "L'Analys

of Exegese et herméneutique

26Roland Barthes and Gilles Lapouge, "Voyage autour de Roland Barthes," La

Quinzaine littéraire , 1 December 1971, p. 4.

27 Critique et vérité ' p. 63.

2*Sur Racine , p. 159.

29Roland Barthes, "La Théorie," VH 101 , No. 2 (Summer 1970). p. 11.

30 Alors la Chine?, p. 10.

31 Image Music Text, p. 148.

32Michael Riffaterre, "Sade or Text as Fantasy," Diacritics, VI, 3 (Fall 1972), 7-9.

33Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang,
1977), p. 94.

34Michel Butor, "La Fascinatrice," Les Cahiers de Chemin, No. 4(15 October 1968), p.
39.

^Sade Fourier Loyola, p. 136.

MIbid., p. 137.

37 Ibid., p. 127.

38 Roland Barthes, p. 94.

, 39Jacques Lacan, "Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je," in his
Ecrits, vol I (Paris: Le Seuil, 1966), pp. 89-97.

40Anthony Wilden, System and Structure (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 486.

41Wilden, p. 282.

42Michel Foucault, Histoire de la f oliera l'âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p.

371.

43Michel Pierssen8 has specifically demonstrated that certain "enlightened

logophiles" (Louis Wolfson, Jean-Pierre Brisset, et al) have created a case for the organic
madness of all language in his La Tour de Babil (Paris: Minuit, 1976).

44"Actes X-XI," pp. 185 ff.

45Roland Barthes, "La Voyageuse de Nuit," in Chateaubriand, La Vie de Rance

(Paris: 10/18, 1965), p. 12.

46Roland Barthes, "Au seminaire," L'Are, No. 56 (1974), p. 49.

47 Le Plaisir du texte , p. 11.

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 ROLAND BARTHES 291

48"Voyage autour de Roland Barthes," p. 4.

49 S /Z, p. 17.

50Roland Barthes and Hector Bianciotti, "Les fantômes de l'opera," Le Nouvel

Observateur , No. 475 (Dec. 17-23, 1973), p. 51.

51 Michael Riffaterre, The Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1978), p. 1.

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