Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Transl. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
Transl. Note
ix
561 numbered fragments, or lexias…one word to several lines—of Sarrasine…
five notorious codes: hermeneutic [formal terms], semantic [semes], proairetic [action], cultural [pysical, physiological, medical, psychological, literary, historical, etc.] and symbolic [unstructured] … discriminating the classical text…from the modern text…undertaken for the sake of the 93 divagations…identified by Roman numerals…page or two….sustained yet pulverized meditation on the reading. …what we do when we read.
x
…we are free to read both the readerly…and the writerly, en connaissance de cause…
3
A choice must then be made: either to place all texts…under the scrutiny of an in-different science…or else to restore each text, not to its individuality, but to its function, making it cohere even before we talk about it, by the infinite paradigm of difference…
4
Opposite the writerly text, then, is the coutervalue, its negative, reactive value: what can be read, but not written: the readerly. We call any readerly text a classic text.
5
…writerly text…productive (and no longer a representative) one, it demolishes any criticism…a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can by superimposed… (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality…
…the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem…structuration without structure. But the readerly texts? They are products (and not productions)…
…interpretation (in the Nietzschean sense of the word).
…galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be [authoritative]…
6
…asserting the very eistence of plurality, which is not that of the true…
…nothing exists outside the text, there is never a whole of the text…
…incompletely plural…more or less parsimonious.
…can grasp only a certain median portion of the plural…modest instrument is connotation. For Hjelmslev, who has defined it…
7
…if E is the expression, C the content, and R the relation of the two which establishes the sign, the formula for the connotation is: (ERC)RC.
…if we base denotation on truth, on objectivity, on law, it is because we are still in awe of the prestige of linguistics…reducing language to the sentence…to return to the closure of Western discourse (scientific, critical, or philosophical), to its centralized organization, to arrange all the meanings of a text in a circle around the hearth of denotation (the hearth: center, guardian, refuge, light of truth).
…if there are readerly texts, committed to the closure system of the West…devoted to thelaw of the Signified, they must have…meaning …based on connotation.
8
Connotation is the way into the polysemy of the classic text….(it is not certain that there are connotations in the modern text).
…we must not confuse connotation with association of ideas…connotation is a correlation immanent in the text…text-as-subject within its own system.
...two spaces: a sequential space…and an agglomerative space, certain areas of the text correlating other meanings outside the material text and, with them, forming “nebulae of signifieds.
9
Historically, by inducing meanings that are apparently recoverable (even if they are not lexical), connotation establishes a (dated) Literature of the Signified. Functionally…fictive dialogue between author and reader, in short, a countercommunication…Structurally, the existence of two supposedly different systems—denotation and connotation—enables the text to operate like a game, each system referring to the other according to the …illusion. Ideologically, finally this game has the advantage of affording the classic text a certain innocence…
…denotation is not the first meaning, but pretends to be so…last of the connotations… true, in relation to which all the rest (which comes afterwards, on top) is literature.
10
I read the text. This statement (subject, verb, complement), is not always true.
This “I” which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)…
Subjectivity…deceptive plenitude is merely the wake of all the codes which constitute me…generality of stereotypes.
Yet reading is not a parasitical act… It is a form of work… I write my reading…
11
To read, in fact, is a labor of language. To read is to find meanings, and find meanings is to name them…
I name, I unnamed, I rename: so the text passes…
…to the plural text forgetting a meaning cannot therefore be seen as a fault.
…it is an affirmative value, a way of asserting the irresponsibility of the text, the pluralism of systems…
12
…to study this text down to the last detail is to take up the structural analysis of narrative where it has been left till now: at the major structures…
…abandoning n site of the signifier without endeavoring to ascertain the code or codes of which this site is perhaps the starting point (or the goal)…
…very slowness and dispersion, avoids penetrating, reversing the tutor text…decomposition (in the cinematographic sense)…
13
The tutor signifier will be cut up into as series of brief, contiguous fragments, which we shall call lexias, since they are units of reading…sometimes a few words, sometimes several sentences…
…the best possible space in which we can observe meanings…
…each lexia should have at most three or four meanings…
14
…we shall propose the semantic substance (divided by not distributed) of several kinds of criticism (psychological, psychoanalytical, thematic, historical, structural)…
21
…off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes…
the Voice of Empirics (the proairetisms), the Voice of the Person (the semes), the Voice of Science (the cultural codes), the Voice of Truth (the hermeneutisms), the Voice of Symbol.